| |
in order not to change it, not to drop it. Even if all the circumstances change you have to go on dogmatically, blindly following it. It needs a certain willpower; it needs cunningness, cleverness, a certain quality of being political, competitive, ambitious, unscrupulous, not bothering about any moral values, reminding yourself again and again that the end justifies the means, so whatsoever means you are using is good if it fulfills the end. Be violent, be deceptive, be dishonest -- IF it pays.
They say, "Honesty is the best policy." But remember, it is a policy, it is not a value -- it is not something intrinsically valuable. Because it pays it is a good policy; if it does not pay, then dishonesty is the best policy.
And you have to be very mindful of what you are doing, of what you are saying, because you will have to tell many lies. You will need a good memory, otherwise you will forget what you have said yesterday and what you are saying today.
A politician needs a good memory. He may not be very intelligent, but he needs a good memory -- and they are two different things. A good memory is a mechanical thing; a good intelligence is a totally different phenomenon. There have been people of great intelligence and very low-grade memory: Albert Einstein, Thomas Alva Edison -- the highest intelligence with the lowest memory. And there have been people of great memory with no intelligence at all.
I was visiting the Hindi University in Benares. A man was brought to me and introduced to me as someone who holds two dozen M.A.s -- two dozen! So once in a while you come across a person who has double M.A.s, but two dozen M.A.s! He has set a record in the whole world. No other human being ever has possessed twenty-four M.A.s in twenty-four subjects.
But the man was utterly stupid! In fact, even without seeing him I would have said that he must be stupid. He wasted his whole life just collecting certificates. And when I told him, "You look stupid," he was very angry! He said, "You are the first person -- everybody has praised me! "
But I said, "I can see in your eyes there is no quality which can say that some intelligence is inside.
|
|
|