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 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.
God is my witness that up to now, my only aspiration in life is to be a useful element within the army! I have for long been convinced that, to safeguard the country and give happiness to the people, it is necessary first of all to prove once more to the world that our army is still the old Turkish army.
We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, Our Flag will be recognized throughout the World as a symbol of Freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other.
Why wouldn't I help? What good reason do I have as a human being with power and a sense of empathy and morality, why wouldn't I do something?
For me, driving - or the right to drive - is not only about moving from A to B; it's a way to emancipate women. It gives them so much liberty. It makes them independent.
I think any woman who has felt violated or felt mistreated in any way, they have every right to speak up.
It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens. We was met in Indianola by policemen, Highway Patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time.
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