War & Peace Quote by Lester B. Pearson

Pearson needles the postwar self-congratulation around "peace" by treating it less as an achievement than as a media event. The line opens with a concession that sounds generous - yes, there is "more talk" - then quietly demotes that talk into something almost suspiciously abundant. The key move is the hedging phrase "I should think", a diplomat's scalpel: it signals reasonableness while inviting the reader to doubt the premise that increased rhetoric equals increased security.

The subtext is that 1945 didn't inaugurate an era of peace so much as an era of peace-branding. After Hiroshima, the United Nations, and the onset of the Cold War, peace becomes both moral imperative and public-relations necessity. Pearson, a Canadian statesman who later won the Nobel Peace Prize for defusing the Suez Crisis, understood how international order is often built in press statements before it's built on the ground. His point isn't anti-idealism; it's institutional realism.

The last clause lands the warning. "Because man's words, for good or ill, can now so easily reach the millions" ties the "talk" to the technology and scale of modern persuasion: radio, newsreels, mass newspapers, the early television age. Mass communication doesn't just spread peace appeals; it also spreads fear, propaganda, and the convenient fiction that saying the right words is a substitute for doing the hard work of compromise. Pearson is marking a new condition of politics: in the modern world, peace must compete in the same attention economy as war.