War & Peace Quote by Dag Hammarskjold

Hammarskjold’s line rejects the political addiction to scoreboards. In the mid-century world of blocs, proxy wars, and newly decolonizing states, “peace and progress” were often sold as deliverables: a treaty signed, a plan funded, a crisis “resolved.” He strips that fantasy down. The phrasing is deliberately repetitive, almost bureaucratic, but the repetition does rhetorical work: it trains the listener away from spectacle and toward endurance. Peace isn’t a headline; it’s an operating condition that has to be maintained.

The key move is the refusal of “either victory or defeat.” Diplomacy usually borrows the language of war even when it claims to prevent it. Hammarskjold implies that framing is itself corrosive. If you treat peace like a contest, you start chasing symbolic wins, punishing compromise, and calling patience weakness. His alternative is a moral stamina that expects “trials and errors” as normal, not scandalous. That’s a quiet rebuke to domestic audiences and member states who demanded purity, certainty, and quick results from the UN while starving it of the authority to actually deliver them.

Context matters: as Secretary-General during the Suez crisis and the Congo crisis, Hammarskjold watched how fast the world could turn procedural neutrality into real human consequences. “Never be relaxed and never abandoned” reads less like inspiration than like a warning from the machine room. The subtext is institutional: the international order survives only if people keep doing the unglamorous work, even when it fails publicly and succeeds privately.