Politics & Power Quote by Henry A. Kissinger

A statesman’s coldest joke is often his clearest self-portrait. Kissinger’s line is pitched as a throwaway wisecrack, but it’s a compact theory of power: when the rewards are tiny, people fight like they’re starving. The phrase “precisely because” does the heavy lifting, flipping the normal assumption that high stakes breed brutality. Instead, small stakes invite a special kind of cruelty - unregulated, petty, and personal - because there’s no larger mission to discipline the ego.

The subtext is twofold. First, it’s a demotion: campus battles are framed as miniature versions of “real” politics, all heat and no consequence. Coming from Kissinger, that’s not neutral; it’s a worldview that sorts conflicts by proximity to state power and treats most moral fervor as theater. Second, it’s a confession about institutions. Universities, like bureaucracies, concentrate status, hierarchy, and scarcity into a sealed ecosystem. When outcomes can’t be measured in money or battlefield maps, they get measured in prestige, access, and symbolic wins - the currencies that make people obsess.

Context matters: the remark is usually linked to Kissinger’s years around Harvard, where departmental rivalries, appointments, and intellectual factions could be blood sport. He’s not merely mocking academics; he’s translating his own experience of coalition-building into a proverb. The line endures because it’s bluntly diagnostic: remove external accountability, shrink the horizon, and politics doesn’t get gentler. It gets meaner.