War & Peace Quote by Andre Maurois

“Business is a combination of war and sport” lands because it refuses the comforting lie that commerce is either polite cooperation or purely rational exchange. Maurois stitches together two arenas where rules exist, but stakes and instincts regularly override them. War supplies the existential edge: scarcity, territory, strategy, casualties. Sport supplies the social permission structure: competition framed as fair play, a contest spectators can cheer without admitting they enjoy conflict.

The subtext is a critique of how capitalism sanitizes aggression. Call it “market share,” “competitive advantage,” “hostile takeover,” and the vocabulary does the laundering. Yet Maurois doesn’t let business off the hook by branding it war alone; “sport” matters. Sport implies performance, stamina, bluff, morale, and the psychological game of reading opponents. It also implies spectatorship: investors, media, and consumers become a crowd that rewards winners and forgets the bruises. If war is about annihilating resistance, sport is about winning within constraints; business often toggles between the two, obeying rules when they help and bending them when they don’t.

Context sharpens the bite. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, Maurois watched industrial modernity turn national economies into engines of competition, with world wars making the metaphor less metaphorical. His line anticipates the managerial age where boardrooms borrow military planning and athletes’ discipline, selling both as virtues. It works because it’s not a moral lecture; it’s an X-ray: beneath the handshake is a contest, beneath the contest is force.