If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.
Interpretation
Peace is more than just the lack of conflict; it requires active effort to maintain justice and order.
Henry A. Kissinger's quote emphasizes that true peace cannot merely be defined as the absence of war or conflict. If society sees peace only as such, it risks becoming complacent and vulnerable to exploitation by those who do not uphold moral standards. Therefore, peace should involve active engagement in justice and ethical governance to ensure a stable and harmonious society.
In practice
This quote can be used during a peace conference to remind attendees of the complexities of achieving true peace.
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.
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.
For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
if we have not found the heaven within,we have not found the heaven without
The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello, world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.
Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.
Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge - the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.
Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.
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