War & Peace Quote by Lester B. Pearson

Pearson’s line is doing two jobs at once: it sanctifies peace as the era’s highest aspiration while quietly admitting how brutally unrealistic that aspiration can feel. The dash - “none more important - or so hard to realise” - is the tell. It’s not poetic flourish; it’s a politician’s controlled concession that the audience already knows peace is slipping out of reach. By naming the difficulty inside the same breath as the ideal, Pearson preempts cynicism. He grants the skeptic their point, then asks them to keep going anyway.

The subtext is less kumbaya than discipline. “Dream” softens the demand, but “faith” and “resolve” are moral verbs with muscle. Faith is inward, resolve is outward: private conviction paired with public action. That pairing matters in the mid-20th century context Pearson inhabited: a world of nuclear brinkmanship, decolonization shocks, and proxy wars where “peace” could sound like either naive wishcasting or ideological propaganda. Pearson tries to rescue the word from both. He frames peace not as a sentiment but as an ongoing conversion project - “convert it...into reality” - suggesting effort, institutions, and compromise rather than a single grand victory.

There’s also a subtle Canadian-internationalist signature here: peace as something built through persistence, not imposed through dominance. In an age when power blocs sold salvation through strength, Pearson argues for a harder sell: patience, coalition, and the refusal to let disillusionment become policy. The rhetoric works because it treats hope as a responsibility, not a mood.