Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
Henry A. KissingerRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Civilizations rise and fall, and this cyclical nature of history is a source of tragic inevitability.
Henry A. Kissinger reflects on the fate of civilizations throughout history, emphasizing that all have faced collapse and failure despite their aspirations. As a historian, he acknowledges that understanding this pattern is essential, as it shapes the perspective with which one approaches the study of history, infusing it with a sense of inevitable tragedy and loss.
Themes
CivilizationCollapseHistoryInevitabilityTragedyAspiration
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on the lessons of history, one might say, 'As Kissinger pointed out, every civilization has ultimately collapsed.'
More from Henry A. Kissinger
All quotes →It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
Henry A. KissingerRead
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
Henry A. KissingerRead
If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.
Henry A. KissingerRead
What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
Henry A. KissingerRead
If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation - and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.
Henry A. KissingerRead
Similar quotes
World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name.
Gore VidalRead
The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.
John Henrik ClarkeRead
The histories of the poor and the powerless are as important as those of their conquerors, their colonizers, their kings and queens.
Johnnetta B. ColeRead
All the old history was written for the amusement of the ruling classes. The lower classes couldn't read, and their rulers didn't care about remembering what happened to them.
Frank ZappaRead
In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
Umberto EcoRead
There are a whole lot of historical factors that have played a part in our being where we are today, and I think that to even to begin to understand our contemporary issues and contemporary problems, you have to understand a little bit about that history.
Wilma MankillerRead