Santiago Aldeco > Santiago's Quotes

“The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been. ”
― Henry Kissinger

“The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts .... He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood, as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
― Isaiah Berlin

“Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence. Only when borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channelled from the idle rich to the industrious poor.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition

“Certain basics about human nature do not change. Man needs a certain moral sense of right and wrong. There is such a thing called evil, and it is not the result of being a victim of society. You are just an evil man, prone to do evil things, and you have to be stopped from doing them.[125]”
― Henry Kissinger, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

“In the same way the failures which a man makes in his life are due almost always to some defect in his personality, some weakness of body, or mind, or character, will, or temperament. The only way to overcome these failings is to build up his personality from within, so that he, by virtue of what is within him, may overcome the weakness which was the cause of the failure. It is only those efforts the man himself puts forth that can really help him.”
― John D. (John Davison) Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events

“The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Economics has gained the title Queen of the Social Sciences by choosing solved political problems as its domain.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

“Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to happen by the combination of such obscure entities as the ‘power’ or ‘mental activity’ assumed by naïve historians; indeed he was, in Kareev’s view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of metaphysically minded writers to attribute causal efficacy to, or idealise, such abstract entities as ‘heroes’, ‘historic forces’, ‘moral forces’, ‘nationalism’, ‘reason’ and so on, whereby they simultaneously committed the two deadly sins of inventing non-existent entities to explain concrete events and of giving free reign to personal, or national, or class, or metaphysical bias.”
― Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History

“So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The most important thing about education is appetite.”
― Winston Churchill

“A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.”
― Henry Kissinger

“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
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― Henry Kissinger

“Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God”
― Henry Kissinger

“As we will show, poor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

“Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just—not only by leaders, but also by citizens. It must reflect two truths: order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent. Can today’s leaders rise above the urgency of day-to-day events to achieve this balance?”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires character and courage: character because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first. And the statesman must then inspire his people to persist in the endeavor.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance, no satisfaction (profit apart) in constructing a factory, a railway, a mine or a farm, there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation.”
― John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

“In Washington...the appearance of power is therefore almost as important as the reality of it. In fact, the appearance is frequently its essential reality”
― Henry Kissinger, The White House Years

“The ability to persuade not only one’s people but also allies and enemies was a vital attribute of the successful strategist. In this way, strategy required a combination of words and deeds, and the ability to manipulate them both.”
― Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History

“A diamond is a chunk of coal that did well under pressure.”
― Henry Kissinger

“Americans have a tendency to believe that when there's a problem there must be a solution.”
― Henry Kissinger

“A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
― Henry Kissinger

“Nemo est qui tibi sapientius suadere possit te ipso: numquam labere, si te audies.

(Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself: if you heed yourself, you'll never go wrong.)”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero , Selected Letters

“Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the formula to break the spell.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

“...poor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty. They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose. To understand this, you have to go beyond economics and expert advice on the best thing to do and, instead, study how decisions actually get made, who gets to make them, and why those people decide to do what they do.”
― Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

“The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition