War & Peace Quote by Thom Yorke

The bleakness here isn’t performative; it’s the sound of someone trying to do the responsible thing (learn the history, read the documents, follow the policy trail) and discovering that knowledge can be its own kind of vertigo. Yorke frames despair as an unwanted byproduct of attention: “I try not to let it get to me” suggests a daily discipline of emotional containment, like turning down the volume on a world that won’t stop blaring. The punch lands in that last clause - “sometimes… there’s no hope” - because it arrives not as ideology but as a private admission, the kind you make when cynicism stops feeling clever and starts feeling like gravity.

The context matters: post-Cold War triumphalism had promised a cleaner century, yet the late 90s and early 2000s were thick with interventions, blowback, and media saturation. “Western foreign policy” isn’t a neutral syllabus topic; it’s a euphemism that carries coups, proxy wars, resource politics, and the polished language that sells them. Yorke’s “and all that” is doing work: it’s the shrug of someone overwhelmed by how much violence can be filed under bureaucratic phrasing.

As a musician, Yorke isn’t claiming policy expertise so much as describing the psychic cost of living in an empire of information. The line captures a generational mood: you read to feel empowered, then realize the system’s endurance is exactly what makes it feel unchangeable. Hope becomes not a feeling but a choice you have to keep re-making against the evidence.