Success Quote by Bernard Baruch

Baruch’s line is a patrician jab at the recurring fantasy that the newest machine will finally let us outsource being human. Coming from a businessman who watched railroads, electrification, mass production, radio, and early computing redraw the economy, the sentence reads less like nostalgia than like a hard-earned investor’s skepticism: tools change fast; judgment doesn’t.

The intent is defensive and corrective. Baruch isn’t denying technological power; he’s puncturing the idea that progress automatically upgrades our moral and cognitive software. “Do away with” is the key verb - it frames each revolution as a would-be replacement for inner qualities, as if society keeps hoping the next breakthrough will eliminate the messy need for integrity, restraint, and independent thought. Baruch’s subtext: every wave of innovation also manufactures new incentives to cheat, conform, or drift on autopilot. The more complex the system, the more valuable character becomes, because the stakes are higher and the accountability more diffuse.

Context matters. As a Wall Street operator and Washington adviser through two world wars and the Great Depression, Baruch lived in institutions where technological change amplified both productivity and propaganda, both market opportunity and mass manipulation. His point is almost managerial: when speed and scale increase, the cost of poor judgment spikes, and the temptation to hide behind “the system” grows. Character becomes a kind of governance technology - the internal check that no external device can reliably provide.