Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others experience. - Otto von Bismarck

There is no doubt, however, that I have caused unhappiness to great numbers. But for me three great wars would not have taken place, eighty thousand men would not have been killed and would not now be mourned by parents, brothers, sisters, and widows. [...] I have settled that with God, however. But I have had little if any pleasure from all that I have done, while on the other hand I have had a great deal of worry, anxiety, and trouble.

The interests of the state alone have guided me, and it has been a calumny when publicists, even well-meaning, have accused me of having ever advocated an aristocratic system. I have never regarded birth as a substitute for want of ability; whenever I have come forward on behalf of landed property, it has not been in the interests of proprietors of my own class, but because I see in the decline of agriculture one of the greatest dangers to our permanence as a state. The ideal that has always floated before me has been a monarchy which should be so far controlled by an independent national representation—according to my notion, representing classes or callings—that monarch or parliament would not be able to alter the existing statutory position before the law separately but only communi consensu; with publicity, and public criticism, by press and Diet, of all political proceedings.

I have never judged international disputes by the standards which prevail at a student's duel.