A crisis does not always apear to a policy-maker as a series of dramatic events. Usually it imposes itself as an exhausting agenda of petty choices demanding both concentration and endurance. One is forced to react to scraps of information in very limited spans of time; longing for full knowledge, one must chart a route through the murk of unknowing.

Henry Kissinger (b. 1923) German-American diplomat

Years of Upheaval, ch. 11 (1982)