We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead.

Baruch opens his presentation of a plan for international control of atomic energy to the United Nations commission. He addresses both the commission and the world’s citizens, then describes the alternatives as world peace and world destruction. The address goes on to propose an international authority and enforceable controls.

Humanity must choose between cooperation that preserves life and a nuclear conflict that destroys it. Here ‘quick’ means living, not fast.

The contrast is not between acting quickly and dying, nor a recommendation to strike first. The ensuing sentences make it a choice between international peace and destruction.

Death, Society, Politics, War

• We are now facing a problem more of ethics than of physics.
• We must elect World Peace or World Destruction.
• Peace is never long preserved by weight of metal or by an armament race.
• Freedom cannot be bestowed — it must be achieved. Elbert Hubbard
• We are today in the midst of a cold war.

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Plan

Bernard Baruch, Address to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (the Baruch Plan) (1946), Opening of the address to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, 14 June 1946. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/choice-between-the-quick-and-the-dead/ (22 October 2026).

Have a different wording, or a source we missed? Check it or submit it.

Do you hold the rights to anything on this page? Tell us.