War & Peace Quote by Bernard Baruch

Baruch’s line doesn’t bargain with history; it corners it. Coming from a businessman rather than a poet or president, the phrasing lands like a boardroom ultimatum dressed up as moral clarity: stop pretending the numbers work. “Let us not deceive ourselves” is less invitation than accusation, a jab at the comforting fiction that the postwar world could muddle through on old habits, old rivalries, old spheres of influence. The sentence turns self-deception into the real enemy, implying that the crisis isn’t ignorance but willful denial.

The real engine is the word “elect.” Baruch drags apocalypse into the language of civic choice and corporate decision-making, suggesting that catastrophe isn’t fate; it’s a policy outcome. That framing matters in the early Cold War moment when the atomic bomb made “peace” and “destruction” feel newly literal, not rhetorical. Baruch, who helped shape U.S. wartime mobilization and later presented the Baruch Plan for international control of atomic energy, is arguing that governance must scale up to match technology. If nations can industrialize war to a global level, they must also industrialize restraint.

There’s subtexted pressure, too: calling it an election implies a binary, then quietly defines the responsible option as alignment with an American-led vision of order. The genius, and the danger, is how clean it sounds. By insisting there are only two doors, Baruch makes compromise feel like complicity and delay feel like a death wish. In an era of mushroom clouds and diplomatic theater, that bluntness wasn’t just style; it was leverage.