Bismarck's genius, as well as ...

Bismarck's genius, as well as his great flaw, was the same as that of another outstanding nineteenth-century politician of the German-speaking world, Prince Clemens Metternich. Both men were artificers, able to hold off the future by building a fragile present out of pieces of the past.
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 Robert D. Kaplan

Quotes from the same author

Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment.
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 Robert D. Kaplan
A lot of the changes are so gradual that they don't even qualify as news, or even as interesting: they're so mundane that we just take them for granted. But history shows that it's the mundane changes that are more important than the dramatic 'newsworthy' events.
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 Robert D. Kaplan