Art & Creativity Quote by Otto von Bismarck

Bismarck’s line is a cold shower for anyone who wants politics to feel like moral arithmetic. “The art of the next best” doesn’t celebrate compromise as kumbaya civility; it treats compromise as craft under constraint. The phrase quietly demotes ideals from commandment to raw material. In Bismarck’s world, the state is a machine with friction, and the statesman is judged less by purity than by whether the machine keeps moving in the desired direction.

The wording matters. “Art” implies skill, timing, and improvisation, not a tidy rulebook. “Next best” concedes loss before victory: you don’t get the best, you get what can survive the vetoes, the coalitions, the budget, the battlefield. That’s not modesty; it’s a power statement. Bismarck is telling you he understands the limits better than the dreamers do, and that understanding is itself a weapon.

Context sharpens the edge. As the architect of German unification, Bismarck operated in a Europe of shifting alliances, rival empires, and domestic factions that could topple a government as easily as a foreign army could. His Realpolitik wasn’t cynicism for its own sake; it was a theory of consequence. The subtext is almost a warning: demand the “best” in politics and you may get the worst - paralysis, backlash, or war.

It’s also a sneaky bid for legitimacy. By framing outcomes as “next best,” leaders can launder hard choices, even brutal ones, as necessity. The line explains statecraft; it also rationalizes it.