War & Peace Quote by Fredrik Bajer

War has a script. It comes with uniforms, budgets, headlines, and the intoxicating clarity of enemy and objective. Bajer’s line needles the uncomfortable truth that peace doesn’t enjoy the same cultural infrastructure. We “understand” war not because it’s morally legible, but because modern states have spent centuries perfecting it as a craft: training, doctrine, ceremonies of sacrifice, the bureaucratic muscle memory of mobilization. Peace, by contrast, is treated as the default setting that simply resumes when the shooting stops.

The bite is in “less consciously.” Bajer isn’t claiming people can’t want peace; he’s accusing societies of failing to practice it with intention. Peace isn’t merely the absence of violence but an ongoing discipline: negotiation, disarmament, arbitration, rebuilding civic trust, creating economic arrangements that don’t quietly rearm resentments. Those are slow, unglamorous tasks with few parades. War produces heroes; peace produces committees.

Context sharpens the critique. Bajer lived through Europe’s late-19th-century arms races and the brutal lesson of industrialized conflict, then helped build early peace institutions as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. His era’s great innovation wasn’t just deadlier weaponry, but the normalization of permanent readiness for war. He’s asking why there’s no equivalent standing apparatus for peace.

The subtext lands today: we fund “defense” as certainty and treat diplomacy as a luxury. Bajer’s intent is to reframe peace as something you wage - planned, resourced, and culturally honored - or you’ll drift back into the only thing you’ve trained yourself to do well.