A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.
Interpretation
Moral perfection in foreign policy is unattainable and can lead to neither safety nor idealism.
Henry Kissinger's quote suggests that striving for absolute moral perfection in the realm of foreign policy is unrealistic and counterproductive. Rather than achieving a flawless or secure outcome, such an approach can lead to failures and vulnerabilities, as the complexities of international relations often require pragmatic, rather than purely idealistic, decisions.
In practice
A speaker at a political conference discussing the complexities of international relations.
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that werenβt realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.
What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
Lots of people think, well, we're humans; we're the most intelligent and accomplished species; we're in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That's what's going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.
The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.
In the U.S., while individual whites might be against racism, they still benefit from their group's control. Yes, an individual person of color can sit at the tables of power, but the overwhelming majority of decision-makers will be white. Yes, white people can have problems and face barriers, but systematic racism won't be one of them.
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
No one comes from the earth like grass. We come like trees. We all have roots.
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