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 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.
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.
People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).
To know that God knows everything about me and yet loves me is indeed my ultimate consolation.
Unwinds didn't go out with a bang-they didn't even go out with a whimper. they went out with the silence of a candle flame pinched between two fingers.
It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
Solitary confinement is too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often beg for the lash instead.
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