War & Peace Quote by Fredrik Bajer

A dry little sentence that smuggles in a whole indictment of modern statehood. Bajer doesn’t rant about militarism; he counts it. “One or two ministers of war” turns armed conflict into bureaucratic inventory, the way you’d list finance or agriculture. That’s the point: war isn’t an aberration in most governments, it’s a standing department, staffed and salaried, normalized through routine titles. The kicker lands in the offhand addendum: “one of whom is the minister of naval affairs.” Even the sea gets its own war manager. The specificity widens the accusation from “states prepare for war” to “states specialize in war,” carving violence into administrative niches.

The phrasing also exposes an absurd asymmetry. States are expected to maintain permanent war portfolios, yet peace rarely gets equivalent institutional dignity. There’s no “minister of peace” in the common cabinet lineup; peace is treated as the default, war as the planned project. Bajer flips that expectation: if war requires ministers, then war is not a last resort but an organized ambition.

Context matters. Bajer, a Danish writer and leading peace advocate (and later a Nobel Peace Prize laureate), wrote in an era when European powers were professionalizing militaries, expanding navies, and turning arms into prestige. His tone is deliberately unheated because the reality is already damning. By describing militarism as office furniture, he invites readers to see how violence persists not only through ideology, but through paperwork, budgets, and the comforting permanence of a job title.