What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
Interpretation
Political leaders often make decisions that intelligence agencies then work to rationalize and validate.
This quote by Henry A. Kissinger highlights the intricate relationship between political leadership and intelligence services. It suggests that decisions made by leaders are often backed up by intelligence agencies that seek to legitimize or justify those decisions, regardless of their ethical implications. This underscores the potential for manipulation and the way in which intelligence can be shaped to fit the narrative of political agendas.
In practice
In a discussion on the role of intelligence in political decision-making during a seminar.
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.
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.
As in forming a political society, each individual contributes some of his rights, in order that he may, from a common stock of rights, derive greater benefits, than he could from merely his own; so, in forming a confederation, each political society should contribute such a share of their rights, as will, from a common stock of these rights, produce the largest quantity of benefits for them.
Don't get mad. Don't get even. Just get elected, then get even.
And as a matter of fact, governments don't act, governments only react. The bankers make the decisions, and then governments decide how are we going to adjust to this. Government can't do anything unless the bank gives them the money to do it.
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Karl Rove thinks we shouldn’t have Hillary Clinton in the White House because she fell and hit her head a couple years ago, spent three days in the hospital, and maybe she has brain damage. You know, I don’t recall the Republicans being this concerned with mental fitness during the years when Reagan was talking to house plants in the White House.
Until politics are a branch of science, we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.
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