War & Peace Quote by George Steiner

Steiner’s line is a provocation dressed as diagnosis: peace, the condition we’re trained to praise, can feel like a kind of spiritual bad weather. The choice of “miasma” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not merely calm or quiet; it’s stagnant, airless, faintly diseased. Against that he sets war as “bracing,” the language of mountain walks and cold plunges. The shock is intentional. Steiner isn’t romanticizing carnage so much as indicting a recurring male appetite for extremity, clarity, and permission.

The subtext is about war’s grotesque convenience. It simplifies moral math, sharpens identity, and turns private restlessness into public purpose. In peace, the self has to negotiate boredom, compromise, and the slow labor of meaning-making. In war, meaning arrives prepackaged: comradeship, urgency, a narrative with heroes and traitors. “To many men” matters, too. Steiner avoids claiming this as human nature; he targets a gendered cultural script that equates intensity with authenticity and restraint with emasculation.

Contextually, Steiner writes in the long shadow of Europe’s 20th century, where “peace” often meant uneasy interwar drift, denial, or the bureaucratic dullness that failed to stop catastrophe. As a critic of language and atrocity, he’s alert to how societies aestheticize violence: war as weather, war as medicine, war as fresh air. The sentence exposes that metaphorical laundering. If peace can feel suffocating, the task isn’t to seek “bracing” destruction; it’s to build forms of peace that don’t rely on adrenaline to feel real.