Sublime

the test of statesmen is the durability of political structures under stress, while prophets gauge their achievements against absolute standards. If the statesman assesses possible courses of action on the basis of their utility rather than their ‘truth’, the prophet regards this approach as sacrilege, a triumph of expediency over universal

Roosevelt didn’t so much distrust experts as lament their limited horizons. It irked him that his own agents—the diplomats and military attachés in the Moscow embassy, the Washington officials who read their reports, even his beloved navy—were close to considering Stalin worse than Hitler: they failed to see the larger possibilities that came with

Washington generalized this perception into an enduring truth of foreign policy, noting that “it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.”15 For Washington, the Continental Army was a practical school in which he received an accelerated course in statecraft,

the last day of his presidency, Clinton warned George Bush and Colin Powell not to trust a word Arafat would say to them.

Presenting a single option designed either to tell a president what he or she wants to hear or to present the consensus position of the cabinet is doing him or her a disservice.