Life & Wisdom Quote by Fredrik Bajer

“Marvelously developed” lands like praise until you hear the metallic laugh behind it. Bajer is staging a grotesque compliment: modern warfare has become so “advanced” that the very idea of further progress turns absurd. The line reads as a progress narrative turned inside out. Where the 19th century loved to brag about railways, factories, and scientific breakthroughs, Bajer applies the same triumphalist language to killing, forcing the reader to confront what industrial modernity has actually optimized.

The second sentence is the real knife. “Impossible to raise it to further heights” doesn’t promise peace; it predicts a ceiling of horror. The subtext is exhaustion and warning: when a society treats violence as an engineering problem, innovation doesn’t stop because morality intervenes; it stops because you’ve reached near-total efficiency. Bajer is pointing at the logic of escalation itself, the way “development” in war tends to mean more anonymous, more scalable, more systematized death.

Context sharpens the sting. Bajer’s lifetime spans the era when warfare becomes increasingly mechanized and bureaucratic, sliding toward the mass slaughter of the early 20th century. As a writer (and a Scandinavian public figure in an age of peace movements), he’s speaking into a moment when Europe could still pretend that civilization’s refinements would tame conflict. His sentence refuses that comfort. It’s a cold forecast disguised as admiration: if this is what “marvelous” looks like, imagine what we’ve been celebrating all along.