War & Peace Quote by Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Bulwer-Lytton’s line is a Victorian sanity check disguised as a neat piece of arithmetic. It starts with a concession that feels almost tender: friendship, no matter how abundant, can still fail you at the exact moment you need it. The “one too few” isn’t about popularity; it’s about the brutal mismatch between social quantity and emotional timing. It also smuggles in a critique of the era’s clubbable, networked masculinity: a man can be surrounded and still stranded.

Then the sentence pivots into politics. The enemy isn’t just a personal rival; it’s a liability, a vote-counting nightmare, a reputational contagion. “Only one enemy” sounds manageable until Bulwer-Lytton reminds you how easily enmity scales. A single adversary can multiply into factions, newspapers, whisper campaigns, and parliamentary obstruction. The punch lands because the math turns paradoxical: you can never quite have enough friends, but you can absolutely have too many enemies, and the threshold is absurdly low.

The subtext is pragmatic, not sentimental. Friendship is framed as episodic and unreliable, while enmity is framed as durable and compounding. Coming from a politician, that asymmetry tracks: allies drift, interests change, but an enemy has a narrative to sustain. The aphorism works because it’s less moral lesson than survival tip, delivered with a cool, wary pessimism that understands power as a social ecosystem where absence hurts, but opposition can metastasize.