It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the inevitability of certain actions shaped by one's nature and circumstances.
Henry A. Kissinger's quote suggests that actions driven by one's innate characteristics and external conditions are often unavoidable, much like a Greek tragedy where the fate of characters is predetermined. Nixon's actions are portrayed as an expression of his nature, indicating that once a particular path is taken, it can lead to an inescapable outcome.
In practice
In a discussion about historical events that shaped politics, this quote reinforces the idea that leaders are often trapped by their own decisions.
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.
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.
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.
The entire universe - for one thing - only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality.
Never limit your view of life by any past experience.
Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it'd lose even its imperfection.
Victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.
I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect
I donβt know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.
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