Realpolitik Quotes & Sayings

[T]hey don't care about realpolitik or the big picture. They only care about monkey-wrenching and whistle blowing. — Peter Watts

Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite's sense of realpolitik but also with the American public's own sense of American values. — Mohsin Hamid

International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power — Hans J. Morgenthau

Shakespeare's ambiguous lubricity in Venus is less disturbing than the bleakly moral emphasis of Lucrece, where virtue is so low-spirited, its exclamation so lachrymose and its justification the nasty realpolitik of Roman Republicanism. The sun has not dried the dew on the grass in Venus, but the ill-lit world of Livy's Rome darkens Lucrece. The first poem lives out of doors; the second is in a permanent chiaroscuro. — Peter Porter

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

You might think that after all the shameful capitulations made by the government during the ups and downs of their negotiations with the maphia ... they could sink no lower. Alas, when one advances blindly across the boggy ground of realpolitik, when pragmatism takes up the baton and conducts the orchestra, ignoring what is written in the score, you can be pretty sure that, as the imperative logic of dishonor will show, there are still, after all, a few more steps to descend. — Jose Saramago

The second effort was spreading the word among the people, first, in a bid to raise their morale, and second to instil in them a sense of animosity towards the enemy, coupled with a spirit of resistence ... this required us to use the language of indoctrination rather than realpolitik. People then were not in need of political analysis, they were in need of being incited and goaded. — Hassan Nasrallah

Bush doesn't present himself as a realpolitik politician. — Peter Singer

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

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests — Henry Kissinger

There is always an element of realpolitik that has to be present in the conduct of any nation's national security affairs. At the same time, we have to also have a balance between realpolitik and Wilsonian principles of freedom and democracy and human rights. And maintaining that balance is the greatest challenge that we in the West, including the Federal Republic of Germany, have to face because it's many times a very difficult decision-making process. — John McCain

How many schoolteachers were aware of what they actually were a part of? Surely a number close to zero. In schoolteaching, as in hamburger-flipping, the paycheck is the decisive ingredient. No insult is meant, at bottom this is what realpolitik means. We all have to eat. — John Taylor Gatto

Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind. — Iain Banks

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.

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

Human relations tend to be more difficult when you're dealing with someone who weighs 30 kilograms more than you do. That's when you worry about whether a well-meaning gesture could produce complications. We have no problems with countries like Madagascar or Bolivia, for example. But Germany is our neighbor and we have a shared past. Besides, Germany is powerful and ambitious and more than four times as large as we are. It makes complete sense that we would act cautiously. It's simply Realpolitik. — Vaclav Klaus

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

for in the absence of a magistrate (dandadharabhave), the strong will swallow the weak; but under his protection, the weak resist the strong. — Kautilya

If the war had a noble purpose, it was this - to end the inhumanity those photographs showed. While India rarely spoke about its imperative as the moral one, and few people steeped in realpolitik can shed their cynicism when a politician speaks in moral terms, and the intervention certainly suited India's strategic interests, the fact remains that in the annals of humanitarian interventions, few were as swift, successful, purpose-driven and with humanitarian goals as the Indian intervention to liberate Bangladesh. India went in when it was attacked, and left before its troops became unpopular. — Salil Tripathi

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

Any critique of realism must begin with a sober assessment of the horrors of peace. — Christopher Hitchens

[Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is an adherent of realpolitik. He knows that international relations are not built on the strength of unilateral demands, but on solutions that are in everybody's best interest. — Martin Schulz

For there are fashions in myth, and the world-conquering West of the nineteenth century needed a philosophy of life in which realpolitik - victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts - was the guiding principle. Thus the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be. — Alan W. Watts

Dane discarded his speargun with visible relief. As a paladin of the Church of God Kraken, he had few options. Like many groups devoid of real power and realpolitik, the church was actually constrained by its aesthetics. Its operatives could not have guns, simply, because guns were not squiddy enough.
It was a common moan. Drunk new soldiers of the Cathedral of the Bees might whine: "It's not that I don't think sting-tipped blowpipes aren't cool, it's just ... " "I've gotten rally good with the steam-cudgel," a disaffected Pistonpunk might ask her elders "but wouldn't it be useful to ... ?" Oh for a carbine, devout assassins pined. — China Mieville

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 United States forgot - if it ever knew - the supreme virtue of an enlightened realpolitik, which is to keep one's powder dry, intervene militarily as a last resort (rather than a first), and maintain industrial and fiscal strength at home. — Mike Lofgren