War & Peace Quote by Edward Gibbon

Gibbon’s line lands like a slap to the romantic portrait of the soldier-hero: courage, he suggests, isn’t rare moral gold but a bulk commodity, produced cheaply wherever states can train men to obey. Coming from an Enlightenment historian with a long view of empires rising and rotting, the provocation isn’t anti-bravery so much as anti-mystique. He’s deflating the rhetoric that lets power dress violence in virtue.

The specific intent is revisionist. By calling soldiers’ courage “cheap,” Gibbon separates personal fearlessness from ethical greatness. You can be brave and still be an instrument. That distinction matters in histories where military glory becomes the alibi for conquest, and where “valor” is invoked to silence questions about why a war is fought, who benefits, and who gets buried.

The subtext is a cool, almost pitiless anthropology. Human beings adapt quickly to environments that reward risk-taking and punish hesitation. In armies, courage can be manufactured: discipline, camaraderie, shame, drill, and the machinery of command convert ordinary survival instincts into something that looks like nobility. If courage is “common,” then praising it is politically convenient but intellectually lazy; it tells you little about a person and even less about a regime.

Contextually, Gibbon is writing in a culture that still trafficked in classical ideals of martial virtue while watching modern states professionalize war. His jab warns readers not to confuse the ease with which societies can produce fighters with the far rarer capacity to produce just causes, restrained power, or humane outcomes.