The phrase is spoken by the philosopher Quincas Borba, who says it to Rubião in chapter VI, when explaining the doctrine of Humanitas, and Rubião repeats it up to his final words. It is the conclusion of an allegory: war conserves, peace destroys, and whoever wins keeps the spoils. The full formula is: "To the vanquished, hatred or compassion; to the victor, the potatoes."
The allegory is that of a potato field and two starving tribes. The potatoes are enough to feed only one of the tribes, which gains strength to cross the mountain and reach the potatoes on the other side; if the two divide the field in peace, both die of starvation. The philosopher concludes: "Peace in this case is destruction; war is conservation." When Rubião asks for the opinion of the exterminated one, he hears: "There is no exterminated one." What disappears, the philosopher says, is the phenomenon; the substance is the same.
Rubião does not understand the allegory when he hears it. Only after inheriting, at home, does he understand it for the first time, see himself as a victor, and even imagine a seal bearing the motto. The narrator observes that he would not have understood it before the will, so true is it that "the landscape depends on the point of view, and that the best way to appreciate the whip is to hold its handle."
At the end of the book the formula returns without the allegory. In Barbacena, Rubião shouts the motto, which he had forgotten "entirely, the formula and the allegory," and from it only "the vague sense of struggle and victory" remains to him. He repeats it in the morning, after the storm, and to the curious who gather at the comadre's door, and the word is repeated in the street without anyone giving it sense. His last phrase, at the hour of death, leaves the motto half-finished.