War & Peace Quote by Dag Hammarskjold

Nice can be a moral achievement, or it can be a social tic. Hammarskjold needles the comforting assumption that civility automatically equals virtue by suggesting a darker possibility: sometimes we’re pleasant to an enemy because we don’t have the spine to be anything else. The line is calibrated to sting bureaucrats and peacemakers in particular, people trained to smooth conflict into process. In that world, “niceness” can function as camouflage for fear of confrontation, careerism, or an addiction to being liked.

The subtext is less about endorsing hostility than about demanding integrity. An enemy, in Hammarskjold’s framing, is a stress test: do your principles hold when politeness costs you something? If you’re “nice” because you can’t tolerate tension, you’re not practicing compassion; you’re outsourcing your ethics to etiquette. He’s drawing a line between deliberate restraint (chosen, costly, accountable) and reflexive agreeableness (unchosen, cheap, self-protective).

Context matters. Hammarskjold wasn’t a columnist tossing off aphorisms; he was the UN Secretary-General during the Cold War, navigating egos, propaganda, and violence while trying to keep diplomacy from becoming theater. His private writing often returns to discipline, duty, and self-scrutiny. Read that way, the jab at niceness is also autobiographical: a warning to himself that peacekeeping isn’t people-pleasing, and neutrality isn’t moral anesthesia. The quote works because it flips a compliment into an indictment, forcing the reader to ask: when I’m “nice,” is it courage - or vacancy?