War & Peace Quote by Richard M. DeVos

Coming from Richard M. DeVos, a billionaire businessman and Amway co-founder, this isn’t a rejection of capitalism so much as a boundary-setting memo from inside the machine. The line works because it concedes what money is supposed to do - secure comfort, reduce stress, smooth the rough edges of life - then yanks the reader into the one arena where wealth reliably fails: the interior. Peace of mind is framed as non-transferable property. You can’t outsource it, buy it in bulk, or scale it.

The phrasing is quietly surgical. “Ruptured relationships” sounds like a medical injury, implying damage that can’t be fixed with a check the way you’d fix a roof. “Build meaning” borrows the language of construction and enterprise, turning the entrepreneur’s favorite verbs against him: even if you’re good at building companies, you can’t assemble purpose out of raw materials like status and consumption. The final clause, “a life that has none,” lands like a diagnosis, not a moral lecture.

The subtext reads as both warning and self-justification. For audiences who idolize wealth, it punctures the fantasy that success equals wholeness. For the wealthy, it offers a kind of absolution: if money can’t buy the deepest goods, then the emptiness some feel isn’t a personal failure of purchasing power; it’s a human limit. In late-20th-century American business culture - where prosperity often doubled as proof of virtue - DeVos is carving out a rare space to admit that the balance sheet can’t settle every account.