Life & Wisdom Quote by Paul Valery

Valery’s line is a scalpel disguised as a definition: it shrinks the grand theater of war into a grubby transaction between strangers and acquaintances. The pivot is “don’t know each other” versus “know each other,” a social contrast that does more moral work than any battlefield imagery. It reframes combat not as a clash of nations or ideals but as a mass, intimate misrecognition: people die for reasons that were never personally theirs, against people they’ve never had a chance to humanize.

The subtext is class war without the banner. Those who “know each other” are the connected few-politicians, industrialists, financiers, senior officers-sharing a closed circuit of interests, dinners, correspondence, and career incentives. They are close enough to negotiate, profit, or at least preserve each other’s status, yet distant from consequence. Valery’s cynicism lands because it exposes a perverse civility: elites maintain relationships across borders while outsourcing violence downward. The sentence’s final sting (“but don’t massacre each other”) implies that the true antagonists are curiously immune to the very logic they sell.

Context sharpens the indictment. Valery lived through the mechanized slaughter of World War I and the anxious lead-up to World War II, eras when mass conscription and industrial killing made “massacre” a literal description rather than rhetorical heat. As a poet-intellectual, he’s not offering policy; he’s puncturing the romance of sacrifice. The intent is to break war’s spell by swapping noble abstractions for a social diagram of who benefits, who bleeds, and why the people with the power to start wars are rarely the people forced to finish them.