War & Peace Quote by Desiderius Erasmus

Erasmus smuggles a moral argument into a seemingly sentimental observation: the baby is his proof that human sociability is older than human malice. The line opens with a bluff of consensus, "Everyone knows", a rhetorical shortcut that turns private feeling into public evidence. It pressures the reader to admit what they already practice - softening at the sight of an infant - and then asks the sharper question: why does this reflex outrun ideology, grievance, even enmity?

The subtext is quietly radical for a Christian humanist writing in a Europe splintering under religious conflict. Erasmus is less interested in babies as cute objects than as a baseline for ethics. In infancy, personhood is reduced to need and vulnerability, stripping away the badges that justify cruelty: faction, doctrine, class, nationality. The enemy's hand reaching out becomes a tiny allegory for peace - not achieved by argument, but by contact with a creature who can't be blamed, recruited, or condemned.

The phrasing also implies a critique of adulthood. If the "first" age is most "universally enjoyable", it's not because babies have mastered happiness, but because adults, around them, briefly remember how to act. Affection becomes a social solvent, dissolving the hard categories that later organize violence. Erasmus isn't claiming humans are naturally pure; he's implying we are naturally interruptible. Even hatred has a loophole, and it wears a swaddle.