Otto von Bismarck Quotes and Sayings
Bismarck has long been recognized as one of the leading statesmen and military strategists of the 19th century. He was almost solely responsible for the successful unification of Germany under the Prussian monarchy, a political strategy that directly led to Germany’s involvement in the First and Second World Wars. But it is not Bismarck’s political accomplishments for which he is most remembered; rather, historians often point to his very prescient projections of how politics would or should play out in Europe and around the world. Many of Bismarck’s observations would strike 21st century diplomats as very reasonable and good advice today.
Here are some of the most important and forward-looking things that Bismarck is purported to have said. Although the contexts of his remarks may have changed, their relevance often seems very strong in the light of modern political crises and wars. Bismarck was a Prussian nobleman, the Prince of Bismarck and the Duke of Lauenburg. He lived from 1815 to 1898. King Wilhelm I appointed Bismarck as Minister President of Prussia in 1862 and by 1871 Bismarck had unified most of the German territories into a German Empire, of which he was Chancellor. He remained in power until his retirement in 1890. Ironically, even though he had imperialist ambitions, Bismarck only reluctantly built up Germany’s overseas holdings. He was not enthusiastic about colonialism at all.
Otto von Bismarck quotes and sayings
In 1848, a year marked by many revolutions across Europe, King Frederick William IV of Prussia faced one such crisis. He refused to retreat into the arms of his soldiers, who wanted to put down the revolution with violence. Bismarck wrote that when the King revealed his intentions to his officers at a meeting in Potsdam “there arose such a murmuring and such a rattling of sabres in their scabbards as no King of Prussia had ever heard before in the midst of his officers, nor, I trust, will ever hear again.” The King prevailed and Bismarck witnessed a political counter-revolution that paved the way for his own future success in government.
One of the most famous expressions for which Bismarck is known is “blood and iron”, but what most people may not realize is that the speech he gave where he used such an expression was forward-looking, not a justification for the wars of unification that followed years later. In 1849, after King Frederick William IV refused to accept a mandate as Emperor (thus averting war with other German states), Bismarck addressed the Budget Committee of the Prussian Chamber of Deputies. Near the end of his speech he said: “Prussia must concentrate and maintain its power for the favorable moment which has already slipped by several times. Prussia’s boundaries according to the Vienna treaties are not favorable to a healthy state life. The great questions of the time will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood.”
In 1863, soon after Bismarck first became a powerful leader, he said: “The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.” Europeans and the United States may have neglected to do that given the current situation in Ukraine.
In 1871, when Germany defeated France in war and the victors were deliberating which French lands should be ceded to Germany, Bismarck opposed the inclusion of Metz. He summed up his objection as: “it is my opinion that the acquisition of purely French districts, where the mass of the population is French, can never contribute to strengthen Germany.” As Nazi Germany learned 70 years later, seizing all of France forced them to defend an immense amount of territory filled with hostile people who organized a large-scale resistance movement. Germany lost so many units in France that it was unable to defend the Rhineland against an allied advance. The same was true of the war in the east, where the Germans followed in the footsteps of Napoleon Bonaparte, throwing away a huge number of lives in a hopeless land war in Asia.
When representatives of one German state complained at length about universal military service and the taxes imposed by the German empire, which many states had joined willingly, Bismarck reportedly said: “Dear me, these gentlemen probably thought they could become Prussians for nothing!”
During one dinner-party, one of Bismarck’s guests made a comment that inspired a rebuke from another guest. The prince reportedly interrupted his second guest, saying: “Pray, don’t trouble yourself. If you will only have patience for two minutes, the learned Herr Professor will at once contradict himself in the most brilliant manner!”
According to some sources, in 1887, when certain German and Austrian generals were maneuvering to launch a war against Russia (despite estimates of huge casualties on both sides), Bismarck reportedly responded to their ideas by pointing out that a preemptive war with Russia would be like “committing suicide for fear of death”. The quotation has evolved over the past century into a more generalized proposition that “preventive war is like committing suicide for fear of death”, although such a maxim would not be accurate in describing a large nation’s war against a very small neighbor (as when the United States invaded Panama).
In fact, Wikiquotes blows this entire scenario out of the water by citing the original German-language source and providing an approximate translation. In February 1876 Bismarck addressed the German Parliament, who were concerned about France’s raising 144,000 additional troops, and he asked them to imagine if they would not have called a doctor to examine him had he, a year earlier, proposed to attack France before France attacked Germany. He compared such a policy of preemptive war to “in a way [committing] suicide from fear of death”.
One of the causes of the disputes between Austria and Russia concerned Bulgaria. When members of the German military and Parliament wanted to make an issue over Bulgaria in 1887, Bismarck said to them: “What is Bulgaria to us?” Later he said: “Bulgaria, that little country between the Danube and the Balkans, is assuredly not an object of sufficient magnitude that, on its account, Europe from Moscow to the Pyrenees and from the Baltic to Palermo should be hurried into a war of which no one can foresee the issue. In the end, after the war, we should hardly know what we had been fighting about.”
It is very difficult to track down all the things Bismarck truly said for he said (or wrote) these things in the German language (Deutsch) and they have been translated (or transmorgrified) into English by various biographers and commentators. One very famous quote attributed to Bismarck, for example, concerns his efforts to restrain his contemporaries from inciting a two-front war with France and Russia. He supposedly said “I am holding two powerful heraldic beasts by their collars, and am keeping them apart for two reasons: first of all, lest they should tear one another to pieces; and secondly, lest they should come to an understanding at our expense.” But this quotation can only be traced to a 1927 book by Emil Ludwig, Bismarck: The Story of A Fighter. Ludwig’s book is not available online but its probable source seems to be an English translation of a German biography of Bismarck. The translation was published in an Australian publication called The Saturday Review of Politics in November 1870 and was titled “Count Bismarck: A Political Biography”. The translation contains the following passage:
…And yet, if history is ransacked, no war presents so little moral justification as the present. Making all abatements, and admitting all qualifications, the cause of the war is to settle which of the two great nations is the strongest in brute force. The long, steady, complete preparation for the war on either side shows that this very simple and intelligible motive was at the bottom of it. It is precisely the noble ambition which impels two savage dogs who happen to live in the same village to fight it out and see which is the strongest dog. Very natural perhaps for a brute; but the horrible thing is that it does not seem so horrible for France and Prussia…
We can hardly imagine how these words, critical of Bismarck’s perceived support for the war (which some historians claim was only fabricated after the war became an inevitability), became transformed into the colorful metaphor of Bismarck holding two savage dogs, and later two heraldic beasts, by their collars, striving to keep them apart.
Another great example of how Bismarck’s words have been transformed by translation is the popular expression “politics is the art of the possible”. Did he really say this? Almost, for in a discussion published in 1867 Bismarck wrote “die Politik ist die Lehre vom Möglichen”. This phrase has been translated as “politics is the art of the possible”, but the Deutsch word lehre more accurately means “teaching”, “doctrine”, “science”, or “theory”. In this context Bismarck probably meant that politics is the theory of the possible. Compare this to Bismarck’s other famous saying, “Die Politik ist keine exakte Wissenschaft” (“politics is not an exact science”, which he said in a speech the Prussian upper house in December 1863). The Deutsch word Wissenschaft can only be translated as “science”.
More Otto von Bismarck Quotes
Other things we attribute to Otto von Bismarck include:
“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
“When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.”
“Your map of Africa is all very fine, but my map of Africa lies in Europe. Here is Russia and here is France, and we are in the middle; that is my map of Africa.”
“When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn’t the slightest intention of putting it into practice.”
“People never lie so much as before an election, during a war, or after a hunt.”
“Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.”
“One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”
“There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, and the United States of America.”
“Anyone who has looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.”
Final Word about Otto von Bismarck Quotes
Not everyone agrees he actually said these things. Tracking down all of Bismarck’s source documents and checking these and other quotations against what was attributed to him in his lifetime might provide someone with a lifelong challenge, and in the end we might think less of the very complex man that history has imagined.