Realpolitik Quotes

“America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”
― Henry Kissinger

“International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power”
― Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations

“for in the absence of a magistrate (dandadharabhave), the strong will swallow the weak; but under his protection, the weak resist the strong.”
― Kautilya, The Arthashastra

“It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.”
― Niall Ferguson

“International politics is never about democracy and human rights. It's about the interests of states. Remember that, no matter what you are told in history lessons.”
― Egon Bahr

“The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough.”
― Robert D. Kaplan

“Generally it must be stated that realpolitik has been better at dividing than at ruling. Take it as a whole since Kissinger called on the Shah in 1972, and see what the harvest has been.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens

“There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself the West. That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the time of the Wall.

Perhaps I go into some sort of shock when I experience something deeply; I'm not sure, even at this ripe middle-age, but I have to admit that what I recall of Berlin is not arranged in my memory in any normal, chronological sequence. My only excuse is that Berlin itself was so abnormal - and yet so bizarrely representative - it was like something unreal; an occasionally macabre Disneyworld which was so much a part of the real world (and the realpolitik world), so much a crystallization of everything these people had managed to produce, wreck, reinstate, venerate, condemn and worship in their history that it defiantly transcended everything it exemplified, and took on a single - if multifariously faceted - meaning of its own; a sum, an answer, a statement no city in its right mind would want or be able to arrive at.”
― Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art

“There must be a better way than to invade Germania!”
― Michael G. Kramer, Full Story of the Anglo-Saxon Invasion

“Any critique of realism must begin with a sober assessment of the horrors of peace.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens

“It is not love, or morality, or international law that determines the outcome of world affairs, but the changing distribution of organized force”
― William Woodruff, A Concise History of the Modern World

“Practical politics consists in ignoring facts, but education and politics are two different and often contradictory things.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams Volume 2

“The study of the powers that shape, maintain and alter the state is the basis of all political insight and leads to the understanding that the law of power governs the world of states just as the law of gravity governs the physical world.”
― ludwig von rochau

“We all know what is meant by the term 'international community,' don't we? It's the West, of course, nothing more, nothing less. Using the term 'international community' is a way of dignifying the West, of globalising it, of making it sound more respectable, more neutral and high-faluting.”
― Martin Jacques

“Machiavelli’s teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith. But it gave an immense impulse to absolutism by silencing the consciences of very religious kings, and made the good and the bad very much alike. Charles V. offered 5000 crowns for the murder of an enemy. Ferdinand I. and Ferdinand II., Henry III. and Louis XIII., each caused his most powerful subject to be treacherously despatched. Elizabeth and Mary Stuart tried to do the same to each other. The way was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy of crime and so thorough a perversion of the moral sense that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed the morality of paganism.”
― John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays

“Ferdinando [King of Naples] resolv’d, in good Earnest, to try how to compromise the Affair of the Castles; being persuaded, that that when this Obstacle was remov'd, Matters would easily return into the fame peaceable Channel. But by removing the Causes, the Effects that sprung from them are not always remov'd. For, as it frequently happens, that Resolutions taken out of Fear seldom appear sufficient to the Fearful.”
― Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Italy

“If you want freedom, somebody’s got to fuck a rat.”
― Carter Scholz, Radiance

“We are where we are, not where we might have been. We fix the problem starting from this spot, not from where we’d like to be.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, The Unused Path: Skills for living an authentic life

“There is no 'right side of history', there is only their side, and yours.”
― Holden R. Snow, Darker Skies Ahead