Henry Kissinger on a new book about Bismarck: 'Bismarck’s opponents were still wedded to the 18th-century concepts of the international system as a great clockwork with intricately meshed parts: the science of Newton. Bismarck foreshadowed an age whose equilibrium was an ever-changing interaction of forces, themselves in constant flux, like later atomic physics. Its appropriate philosopher was not Descartes but Darwin; not “I think, therefore I am,” but the “survival of the fittest.”'
Schleiermacher oversaw Bismarck's confirmation in the Lutheran Church at Berlin's Holy Trinity Church. Later in life, Bismarck forgot whatever Schleiermacher had taught him.