War & Peace Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line lands like a diagnosis disguised as moral counsel: the combative person isn’t just unlucky in their enemies, they’re leaking conflict from the inside out. As a critic by trade, Hazlitt knew that public fights often masquerade as principle while functioning as self-therapy. The sentence has the neat, balanced architecture of an aphorism, but its bite comes from the insinuation that aggression is less strength than symptom.

The intent is corrective, almost clinical. “At war with others” isn’t limited to armies; it’s the everyday posture of someone who needs antagonists to feel coherent. Hazlitt’s subtext is that external hostility is frequently a projection: the mind, unable to settle its own contradictions, hunts for a target that can be named, blamed, and “defeated.” That’s why the second clause matters more than the first. “Not at peace with themselves” reframes conflict as a failure of self-government. The enemy is useful because it simplifies an internal mess into a righteous storyline.

Context sharpens the edge. Hazlitt wrote in a Britain roiled by the aftershocks of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, when politics turned disagreement into identity and pamphlet culture rewarded outrage. He also lived in the thick of literary feuds, watching how reputations were built through takedowns. The line reads, now, like an early critique of our attention economy: perpetual combat feels like conviction, but it often signals unrest. Peace, Hazlitt implies, is not passivity; it’s the rare ability to stop needing someone else to lose in order to feel whole.