War & Peace Quote by George Orwell

Orwell is puncturing the comforting pose of neutrality: the idea that wars are just tragic weather systems, morally interchangeable depending on where you stand. His phrasing is doing sly work. “Hardly such a thing” concedes complexity without yielding the point; “nearly always” leaves room for exceptions while still indicting the reflex to shrug. Then he tightens the screw with those repeated qualifiers - “more or less” - a signal that he’s not selling a cartoon of heroes and villains. Even compromised coalitions, he implies, still pull history in different directions.

The subtext is aimed at a certain kind of sophisticated cynic: the person who thinks refusing to pick a side is evidence of depth. For Orwell, that stance often functions as a luxury belief, available to people insulated from the consequences. If you can afford to treat outcomes as symmetrical, it’s usually because you won’t be the one living under the victor’s police, borders, and textbooks.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of fascism and the ideological trench warfare of the 1930s and 40s, Orwell had watched “anti-war” rhetoric get weaponized into passivity - or worse, into tacit support for the stronger aggressor. His own politics were anti-authoritarian left, which is why “progress” here isn’t a naive faith in history; it’s a practical yardstick: which side expands human freedom and material security, which side restores hierarchy by force.

The line works because it refuses two temptations at once: moral relativism and moral purity. It argues for imperfect alignment with the better direction of travel, not for innocence.