Realpolitik History Quotes & Sayings

There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told. — Azar Nafisi

The Bible's emphasis on right relationships is a challenge to our culture's destructive focus on the self — Guy Brandon

She's so dark, so harsh, so wounded. Her prickly exterior would keep most everyone away.
And yet all I want to do is get closer. — K.A. Tucker

Now you are the helper of this victim, tomorrow the victim will be the killer and you will be the victim. — Deyth Banger

My books often involve characters who began in some form of mental isolation, with a feeling of having died to the world. Then they become involved in some kind of action where by necessity they're forced to reengage, to get back into the game of life, as it were. You could say that about 'Chance.' — Kem Nunn

If God's Word says He hears and answers prayer, and if that Word doesn't depart from before your eyes, then you're bound to see yourself with the things you asked for. If you don't see yourself with the things you desire, then God's Word has departed from before your eyes. — Kenneth E. Hagin

Stop looking all over the place for "the answers" - whatever they are - and start looking for the questions - the inquiries which are most important in your life, and give them answers. You do not live each day to discover what it holds for you, but to create it. — Neale Donald Walsch

What's the weirdest thing you've pierced?"
"Earlobes," he plainly stated.
"Earlobes?"
"Yeah," he said. "Once you've held a couple dozen penises in your hand, earlobes are just weird. — Sean Aiken

Elections matter, but how much they matter depends entirely on how free, open and fair they are. — Elliott Abrams

What I had been taught all my life was not true: experience is not the best teacher! Some people learn and grow as a result of their experience; some people don't. Everybody has some kind of experience. It's what you do with that experience that matters. — John C. Maxwell

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

To understand what was in Ivan's mind, one has to think back to what the world was like before Machiavelli. The modern calculus of profit and loss probably meant nothing to Ivan. He never thought about realpolitik. His concerns were with tradition and posterity, history and fame, apocalypse and eternity. — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

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

After the Stonewall riots the gay activists had their idealistic hearts in the right place but it turned out they had underestimated the realpolitik of organized crime. Indeed, as gay liberation blossomed in the wild 1970s the bars and bathhouses became increasingly lucrative enterprises, and the Mafia had no intention of abandoning a racket it had controlled for decades. The Mafia families maintained their control by exercising the proverbial carrot and stick. The wise guys seemingly embraced the gay rights movement and cut more so-called Auntie Gays into the action as their fronts, and resorted to violent threats and sometimes murder against others who refused to play ball with the crime families. There were few legitimate businessmen in gay nightlife of the 1970s. — Phillip Crawford Jr.

But be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind; not now after your kind, as though following your neighbour who went before you, nor as living after the example of some better man (for Thou saidst not, "Let man be made after his kind," but, Let us make man after our own image and similitude), that — Augustine Of Hippo