Wit & Attitude Quote by Blaise Pascal

Pascal lands the blade with a question that pretends to be naive and ends up sounding ruthless. The river is doing the work here: a thin, arbitrary line that somehow alchemizes a neighbor into a legitimate target. By choosing something as natural and indifferent as geography, he exposes how political authority launders violence into “rights.” Not just the right to fight, but the right to kill, as if murder becomes a property claim the moment it’s stamped by a ruler.

The subtext is a demolition of sovereignty’s moral alibi. Pascal isn’t merely condemning war; he’s ridiculing the chain of delegation that makes war feel impersonal. Two rulers quarrel, and the quarrel trickles down into the bodies of people who have no stake, no consent, no animus. The passive voice of politics (“my ruler,” “his ruler”) becomes an active machine: strangers are drafted into intimacy through harm.

Historically, Pascal is writing in a Europe of frequent dynastic wars and shifting borders, where allegiance could be inherited like debt. In the Pensees, he repeatedly attacks the way custom and force conspire to pass as justice. This line is that argument in miniature: justice, when tied to borders and badges, becomes a bureaucratic hallucination. The question stings because it’s hard to answer without admitting the scandal Pascal wants on the table: most public “legitimacy” is just violence with better paperwork.