Quote by Mikhail Sholokhov: “War is the work of men. They start it, they finish it.”

This powerful statement places the full responsibility for conflict squarely on humanity, emphasizing that wars are not natural disasters but intentional human creations. It suggests that since humans initiate them, they also possess the agency to conclude them.

Sholokhov's epic 'And Quiet Flows the Don' chronicles the lives of Don Cossacks during World War I and the Russian Civil War, detailing the immense human cost and the agency of individuals in both starting and ending conflicts.

Russian novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965, best known for his four-volume epic And Quiet Flows the Don, which depicts the Cossack people of the Don River region through the First World War, the Revolution, and the Civil War. His short story The Fate of a Man, published in 1957, became one of the most celebrated accounts of a Soviet soldier's survival in the Second World War.