Quotes About Bismarck

The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen.

Naval and occasionally land-based air power turned the great sea battles—the fighting near Singapore, the chase of the Bismarck, the Coral Sea, Midway, the fight over the Marianas, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa—mostly into contests of carrier-based aircraft attacking with impunity any enemy ships except like kind.

Bismarck urged that foreign policy had to be based not on sentiment but on an assessment of strength," Kissinger wrote. That would also become one of Kissinger's guiding principles.

In der Morgensonne schlenderte er über den Kurfürstendamm, kaufte sich an einem Kiosk einen Baedeker und nahm ein Taxi zum verwüsteten Reichstag, wo man emsig an der Restaurierung arbeite. Das Gebäude war barhäuptig: die große Mittelkuppel – Bismarcks Helm – war verschwunden, und als er sich umdrehte, sah er am anderen Ende der großen Wiese im Tiergarten das neue Kongreßzentrum, das exakt die Form von Hitlers Mütze hatte.

The middle classes, grown prosperous by the belated but staggering development of the industrial revolution and dazzled by the success of Bismarck's policy of force and war, had traded for material gain any aspirations for political freedom they may have had.

A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck's nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: "We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.

Realpolitik for Bismarck depended on flexibility and on the ability to exploit every available option without the constraint of ideology.

Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany at the age of seventy-three, an age by which Bismarck's career was nearing its end.

For nearly twenty years, Bismarck preserved the peace and eased international tension with his moderation and flexibility. But he paid the price of misunderstood greatness, for his successors and would-be imitators could draw no better lesson from his example than multiplying arms and waging a war which would cause the suicide of European civilization.

They should have remembered that famous saying of Bismarck: "Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.

To imagine that Hitler was merely following in, say, Bismarck's footsteps was profoundly to misunderstand the man and his view of the world. Bismarck thought in terms of great-power politics, Hitler of racial triumph.

Baron Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen had just returned from St. Petersburg, where he had been Prussian ambassador. He was a conservative of the extreme type, hated and feared by the liberal and national party no less than Metternich. But no man better than he comprehended the policy of Austria, and all the complicated threads composing

When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.