War & Peace Quote by Graham Greene

Greene’s line flips our usual cruelty calculus. We’re trained to resent the beautiful, the clever, the successful because they look like winners in a rigged game, safe targets for our “pitiless war.” Envy can masquerade as justice when the person you’re attacking already seems armored by luck. The punch of the sentence is its sudden moral trapdoor: “but not against the unattractive.” Here, cruelty stops being a sport and starts feeling like a crime.

The intent is less sentimental than surgical. Greene isn’t asking us to be kind; he’s exposing how our aggression depends on plausible deniability. You can attack glamour and call it satire, puncture arrogance and call it truth-telling. But when the person in front of you lacks the social camouflage of beauty or status, the same impulse reads unmistakably as bullying. That’s the “millstone” - guilt as physical weight, not an abstract ethical principle. The image drags you downward because it’s harder to pretend you’re punching up.

Subtextually, Greene is diagnosing a culture that treats attractiveness as a kind of moral credit score. The attractive can “afford” public hostility; the unattractive cannot, because they’re already presumed diminished. Coming from a playwright and novelist steeped in Catholic-inflected pity and human failure, it fits his recurring preoccupation: sin isn’t exotic; it’s ordinary, opportunistic, and often justified with style. The line works because it admits an ugly truth about our ethics: they get stricter precisely when our victim looks defenseless.