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.
When Christians say God has been talking to them about something, it simply means they have a strong inner conviction or feeling that God has made His will known to them.
To ignore Scripture is to ignore Christ.
When strength is yoked with justice, where is a mightier pair than they?
Only man is permitted to live without rhythm in order that he can become free. However, he must of his own accord bring rhythm again into the chaos.
There is nothing on earth that I would not give up, excepting of course, two things and two things only, truth and nonviolence.
Whatever the reason, for most of the present century, the literature and publicity of the old established [animal welfare] groups made a significant contribution to the prevailing attitude that dogs and cats and wild animals need protection, but other animals do not. Thus people came to think of "animal welfare" as something for kindly ladies who are dotty about cats, and not as a cause founded on basic principles of justice and morality.
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