War & Peace Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde needles the reader by treating war less as a policy problem than as a taste problem. The line flips a familiar moral posture on its head: condemning war as “wicked” doesn’t drain its appeal, it varnishes it. Wickedness carries glamour. It promises transgression, drama, and a shortcut to meaning for people bored by the slow, uncinematic labor of peace. Wilde’s point isn’t that war is secretly good; it’s that moral outrage can be an advertisement, granting war the aesthetic charge of the forbidden.

The real barb lands in the second sentence. If war were seen as “vulgar,” it would lose its audience. Vulgar is Wilde’s deadliest adjective: not sinful, not tragic, just gauche. He’s mocking the way societies curate their violence through language and ceremony - medals, uniforms, euphemisms, solemn speeches - all designed to keep slaughter from looking like what it often is: crude, repetitive, ugly, and staffed by the poor. “Wicked” lets elites condemn war while still savoring its pageantry; “vulgar” would collapse that comfortable distance by making war socially embarrassing.

Context matters. Wilde is writing in an era when Britain’s imperial wars were increasingly mass-mediated and narrativized, while Victorian respectability coexisted with deep appetites for sensation. As a dramatist and professional anatomist of hypocrisy, he’s diagnosing a culture that manages conscience through aesthetics. If you want war to stop being “popular,” he implies, moralizing isn’t enough; you have to strip away its style.