A Quote by Henry A. Kissinger
It is always easy to divide the world into idealists and power-oriented people. The idealists are presumed to be the noble people, and the power-oriented people are the ones that cause all the world's trouble.
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Idealists are people who believe in the potential of human nature for transformation. . . . The most essential attribute of human nature is its mutability and freedom from instinct . . . it is always within our power to change our nature. So it is actually the idealists who are on the mark and the realists who are off base.
It's such a frustration when you see in the name of religion, in the name of God, what people are doing is something we never expected. The religion has to be Spirit-oriented, but it is only power-oriented or money-oriented. In the original scriptures, or we can say in the origin of this religion was the truth. And all these religions bloom on the same play of spirituality like beautiful flowers at different times, but people have plucked it and now they are fighting with the dead flowers.
When people who are seeking change start out, they are driven by commitment to a cause. But as internecine power struggles take over, one-time idealists fall prey to corruption. They become just as corrupt and manipulative as the system that they want to overthrow.
Our whole attitude about life is money-oriented. And money is one of the most uncreative things one can become interested in. Our whole approach is power-oriented and power is destructive, not creative. A man who is after money will become destructive, because money has to be robbed, exploited; it has to be taken away from many people, only then can you have it. Power simply means you have to make many people impotent, you have to destroy them - only then will you be powerful, can you be powerful.
The bipolar world of the Cold War is history. The new world order, however, is not the One World dreamed of by Wilsonian idealists. It is a Balkanizing world where race, tribe, culture and creed matter most, and democracy is seen not as an end in itself but as a means to an end - the accretion of power by one's own kind to achieve one's own dreams.
It was as if the power and loneliness of the vampires' world had combined with the group oriented puppy-pile world of the shapeshifters and made something new.
To me we're living in this very profoundly non-idealogical time where the real divide is between people who have power and people who either don't have power or feel that they don't have power.
And the American people are the greatest people in the world. What makes America the greatest nation in the world is the heart of the American people: hardworking, innovative, risk-taking, God- loving, family-oriented American people.
I always want to tell these young idealists that the world is not as dangerous as many in the older generation want them to believe...The [people] for whom I feel the greatest sadness are the ones who choke on their beliefs, who never act on their ideals, who never know the state of struggle in a decent cause, and never know the thrill of even partial victories.
There's a lot of hip-hop that's oriented toward a progressive view of America because it's oriented toward a civil rights progress and a critique of the power structure.
Most creative people fall into one of two categories - either they're task-oriented, or they're time-oriented.
Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things.
Which is more remarkable fact about America: that millionaires are idealists or idealists become millionaires.
One of the marks of successful people is they are action oriented. One of the marks of average people is they are talk oriented.
I'm impatient. Typically people think they know all about change and don't need help. Their approach tends to be more management-oriented than leadership-oriented. It's very frustrating.
The particular thing about science is to combine that [the dreams of obtaining power] with a retreat from the world. Other people want to obtain power by going out into the world, but the scientist really wants to obtain power by retreating from the world.
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