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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of integrity and unwavering principles, even in moments of vulnerability.
Henry A. Kissinger's quote highlights the idea that, in the face of captivity or adversity, one should remain steadfast in their principles and not compromise on their values. It suggests that any request for negotiation under duress should not be taken as a genuine willingness to negotiate, but rather as a sign of coercion, emphasizing the need to maintain one's integrity even in challenging situations.
In practice
During a speech on human rights, to illustrate the importance of standing firm in one's beliefs even under pressure.
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.
We began a contest for liberty ill provided with the means for the war, relying on our patriotism to supply the deficiency. We expected to encounter many wants and distressed we must bear the present evils and fortitude
There’s no way I’m going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country.
Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression.
Antiabortion rules disproportionately harm women of color and low-income women of every ethnicity, affecting their economic capacity and threatening their very lives.
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.
An act of heroism, of extraordinary courage, the grandeur of it, won't easily inspire us to act in imitation, but it can inspire us to emulate its author. For that, we should learn what we can of the whole experience of the subject, the hero's life, as it was before and after, and believe that trying to emulate the character it reveals is one tried way to prepare for the tests that might await us and gain hope that our courage will not be wanting in the moment.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.