In terms intellectually, [what] shaped my life was the whole Munich thing [the Munich Agreement] that I knew about all my life, in terms of how large powers make decisions that affect small countries, and the unintended consequences of that. The other part is I knew about the Holocaust. l just didn't know that it applied to my family. But that did affect the way I thought about what I was seeing as ethnic cleansing in the Balkans; there's no question about that.
People sometimes say I broke an oath of secrecy - one of the early charges leveled against me. But it's a fundamental misunderstanding, because there is no oath of secrecy for people who work in the intelligence community. You are asked to sign a civil agreement, called a Standard Form 312, which basically says if you disclose classified information, they can sue you; they can do this, that and the other. And you risk going to jail.
Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.
Ultimately, my more significant agreement is with a virtue tradition that features Aristotle and Descartes.
The State did not originate in any form of social agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of society permanently into two classes-an owning and exploiting class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. . . . No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.
Often vastly more important, international agreements are not routinely published in draft form or publicly debated, and civil society organizations and ordinary citizens often learn of important global institutional design decisions only after they have already been finalized and adopted. The only reliable way to be kept informed and to exert timely influence is by lobbying and paying the politicians and their negotiators.
Trade agreements are a net benefit for the world, and a net benefit for our foreign policy, and in the long run, given the dislocations, are a net benefit for us, too.
It is certain that the only hope of retroductive reasoning ever reaching the truth is that there may be some natural tendency toward an agreement between the ideas which suggest themselves to the human mind and those which are concerned in the laws of nature.
Sanity - a trick of agreement
As a party of labor, the SPD must work together with the unions to ensure that people can make a living with their work. That is why I am not a proponent of the concept of unconditional basic income. I am, however, very much in favor of decent wage agreements, secure and lasting jobs, employee participation in decision-making and the examination of the social justification for claims and payments.
As far as co-operation with The Hague is concerned it's impossible (to arrest Milosevic) by March 31 without an agreement on the federal level despite the consequences such a move could have.
It's not a free trade agreement. It has virtually nothing to do with free trade. . . It's a protectionist agreement; it's anti free-trade.
One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.
I thought at the time of my parents' divorce that I was upset by deeper, more profound things and I was just taking it out on the joint custody agreement. But that disruption was bad enough. That was a huge deal for a teenager.
This is one of the gravest crises Europe has ever experienced. . . An agreement failed because of the completely stubborn attitudes of the UK and the Netherlands.
There are some things fundamentally off about the stance of the book. And maybe that's okay; maybe every book is flawed, and great books, as flawed as they might be, articulate a moral argument that the reader then carries forward. The critique to this model is, of course, to ask: Should a book be ever so perfect that you come out of it with complete moral agreement that can be sustained?
I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time. It's very unusual in Hollywood. Few people are trustworthy - a handshake means nothing to them. They feel they're required to keep an agreement with you only if you're successful or they need you.
The First Goal of Conversation: Understanding, not Agreement
He received me not only cordially, but he was also full of confidence with respect to the war. His first words, after he had welcomed me, were as follows: 'Well, Dr. Weismann, we have as good as beaten them already. ' I. . . thanked him for his constant support for the Zionist course. 'You were standing at the cradle of this enterprise. ' I said to him, 'and hopefully you will live to see that we have succeeded. ' Adding that after the war we would build up a state of three to four million Jews in Palestine, whereupon he replied: 'Yes, go ahead, I am full in agreement with this idea. '
The goal of #BDS is the full restoration of Palestinian rights, not an agreement to create an artificial mini-state in order to save Zionism