In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.
Interpretation
Kissinger reflects on the potential paths to achieving lasting peace in the world.
In this quote, Henry A. Kissinger references Immanuel Kant's notion that true and lasting peace may be achieved either through human wisdom and understanding or through severe conflicts that ultimately force humanity to change its ways. Kissinger suggests that the world may be at a crucial point where its future, especially regarding peace, hangs in the balance due to significant challenges and conflicts faced today.
In practice
In a speech about global diplomacy, one might say, 'As we navigate today's challenges, we must remember that, as Kant suggested, peace may only come through insight or through the harsh lessons of conflict.'
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t 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.
Money is far more persuasive than logical arguments.
Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that tied them together.
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.
Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may.
Since God often sends us inspirations by means of His angels, we should frequently return our aspirations to him by means of the same messengers.
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