War & Peace Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw flips the moral furniture with a single sly pivot: yes, peace is preferable, but it is also the harder job. The line punctures the lazy assumption that “peace” is the default setting once the shooting stops. War, for all its horror, offers a grim kind of narrative simplicity: enemies named, goals narrowed, emotions licensed. It organizes chaos into banners and slogans. Peace denies that convenience. It demands patience with ambiguity, compromise with people you’d rather dismiss, and a long attention span for the unglamorous work of institutions, repairs, and coexistence.

The intent is provocation, but not mere contrarianism. Shaw is warning audiences against the sentimental branding of peace as softness. He’s also taking a jab at moral posturing: it’s easy to be righteously antiwar in the abstract, harder to accept the daily disciplines that make peace real - power-sharing, accountability, economic redistribution, restraint. “Infinitely” is the needle: he’s not weighing costs in a tidy ledger; he’s emphasizing a qualitative difference. Peace is arduous because it has no climax. It’s maintenance, not victory.

Context matters: Shaw lived through the age when Europe’s “civilized” powers industrialized slaughter, then tried to stitch society back together with brittle treaties and exhausted populations. As a dramatist, he understood that conflict sells; the deeper irony is that society often prefers the drama of war to the tedious ethics of peace. Shaw’s line dares the reader to admit that preference, then outgrow it.