What sort of character changes history? What and how do we learn from history? Why is it so hard to learn the 'unrecognised simplicities'? How did he approach problems we face?
This trade teaches that one can be as shrewd as the shrewdest in this world and still at any moment go like a child into the dark.
To be a minister too long and to be successful with God’s help is to feel distinctly the cold tide of disfavour and hate rising higher and higher right up to the heart. One gains no new friends, the old ones die, or back off in disaffection. Furthermore, the cold descends from above — that is the natural history of all rulers, even the best. Yet every favourable inclination requires reciprocity if it is to last. In short, I am freezing emotionally, and I long for your company and to be with you in the solitude of the country.
As God will, it is all merely a matter of time; nations and individuals, folly and wisdom, war and peace, they come and go like waves, and the sea remains. What are our states and their power and honour in God’s eyes but ant-hills or beehives that the hoof of the bullock tramples flat or fate overtakes in the person of the bee-keeper come to collect the honey.
In an emergency one cannot be hypersensitive about methods — with a gentleman a gentleman and a half, à corsaire, corsaire et demi [with a pirate a pirate-and-a-half].
Great crises constitute the weather that favours Prussia’s growth, provided that it is fearlessly, perhaps even ruthlessly, exploited by us.
Austria’s conflict and rivalry with us was no more culpable than ours with her, and our task was the establishment or initiation of a German national unity under the leadership of the King of Prussia… I repeated that we were not there to administer retributive justice, but to pursue a policy.
State socialism is on the march and there is no stopping it. Whoever embraces this idea will come to power.
The trouble about politics is that you can never be certain when your policy has been correct. Perhaps our policy after 1866 was in fact mistaken.
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/1-on-bismarck-the-ultimate-practical
