What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
Interpretation
Political leaders often make decisions that intelligence agencies then work to rationalize and validate.
This quote by Henry A. Kissinger highlights the intricate relationship between political leadership and intelligence services. It suggests that decisions made by leaders are often backed up by intelligence agencies that seek to legitimize or justify those decisions, regardless of their ethical implications. This underscores the potential for manipulation and the way in which intelligence can be shaped to fit the narrative of political agendas.
In practice
In a discussion on the role of intelligence in political decision-making during a seminar.
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.
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 danger to the country, to Europe, to her vast Empire, which is involved in having all these great interests entrusted to the shaking hand of an old, wild, and incomprehensible man of 82, is very great!
I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.
You call that statesmanship. I call it an emotional spasm.
An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy.
A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives, a politics that does not speak to and include people, is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail.
It is impossible that the whisper of a faction should prevail against the voice of a nation.
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