Top 100 Henry A. Kissinger Quotes
#1. Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.
Henry A. Kissinger
#2. They [American forces] are there as an expression of the American national interest to prevent the Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology from dominating a region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend.
Henry A. Kissinger
#3. You should not go to war for the privilege of withdrawal. You need to define your objective and the outcome, and it cannot be the removal of one man.
Henry A. Kissinger
#4. I don't think we should pay people to fight terrorism. I would be amazed if they asked for anything in return.
Henry A. Kissinger
#5. Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.
Henry A. Kissinger
#6. To have the United States suddenly come up with a peace proposal after a whole series of terrorist attacks is going to show to the world that this sort of method is something that western societies can't stand.
Henry A. Kissinger
#7. China has had a long and complex history and has managed to evolve its own culture for 4,000 years. It therefore not necessarily true that we know exactly what is best for the internal structure of China.
Henry A. Kissinger
#8. In the middle '50s, I had written that the point would come, inevitably, at which the relationship between the cause of conflict and political objectives would be lost.
Henry A. Kissinger
#9. The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
Henry A. Kissinger
#10. Diplomats operate through deadlock, which is the way by which two sides can test each other's determination. Even if they have egos for it few heads of government have the time to resolve stalemates, their meetings are too short and the demands of protocol too heavy.
Henry A. Kissinger
#12. Americans believe that you can alter people by conversion, and that everybody in the world is a potential American. The Chinese also believe that their values are universal, but they do not believe that you can convert to becoming a Chinese unless you are born into it.
Henry A. Kissinger
#13. It is always easy to divide the world into idealists and power-oriented people. The idealists are presumed to be the noble people, and the power-oriented people are the ones that cause all the world's trouble.
Henry A. Kissinger
#14. Well, the capacity of French intellectuals to understand a Texan way of thinking is finite.
Henry A. Kissinger
#15. I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power.
Henry A. Kissinger
#16. Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
Henry A. Kissinger
#17. The Chinese, on the other hand, were in the position of having an American military spy plane on a Chinese military base and they had their own internal problems to deal with. At first, the Chinese weren't all that belligerent. They were just stalling to get their own bureaucracy in line.
Henry A. Kissinger
#19. American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.
Henry A. Kissinger
#21. If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.
Henry A. Kissinger
#22. Our nation is uniquely endowed to play a creative and decisive role in the new order which is taking form around us.
Henry A. Kissinger
#23. The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.
Henry A. Kissinger
#24. We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.
Henry A. Kissinger
#26. President Nixon in his inaugural address indicated that he wanted an era of negotiation. Our reasoning was that whatever our ideological differences, whatever our geopolitical differences, we were condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons.
Henry A. Kissinger
#27. People think responsibility is hard to bear. It's not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.
Henry A. Kissinger
#28. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
Henry A. Kissinger
#29. A nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions.
Henry A. Kissinger
#33. Every success is usually an admission ticket to a new set of decisions.
Henry A. Kissinger
#34. [Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia . He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.
Henry A. Kissinger
#35. Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.
Henry A. Kissinger
#36. This country cannot afford to tear itself apart on a partisan basis on issues so vital to our national security.
Henry A. Kissinger
#38. The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities. Demonization is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction.
Henry A. Kissinger
#39. The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.
Henry A. Kissinger
#40. If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation - and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.
Henry A. Kissinger
#41. The American formal position has been that we oppose violence by governments against their people. That principle should not be abandoned.
Henry A. Kissinger
#42. Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries
Henry A. Kissinger
#43. I grew up as a discriminated minority in a dictatorship, so obviously the issue of human rights is a matter of concern for me.
Henry A. Kissinger
#44. We have three things in common: Irish wives, the ability to speak for 17 minutes without a verb, and the fact that we both speak with an accent.
Henry A. Kissinger
#45. Tutelage is a comfortable relationship for the senior partner, but it is demoralizing in the long run. It breeds illusions of omniscience on one side and attitudes of impotent irresponsibility on the other.
Henry A. Kissinger
#46. Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?
Henry A. Kissinger
#47. The British capitalize on their accent when they don't want you to know what they're saying. But if you wake them up at 4 A.M., they speak perfect English, the same as we do.
Henry A. Kissinger
#49. What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
Henry A. Kissinger
#50. Well, on the American side, every new administration has to cut its teeth in a crisis, because before a crisis, you don't really know what your various subordinates are thinking under stress.
Henry A. Kissinger
#51. Certainly nothing is easier than to rewrite history. If we had made Taiwan a separate state, it would have led to a fundamental conflict with China, and probably to war. Certainly in the long term, it would have led to war.
Henry A. Kissinger
#52. I also do not believe that the United States can let itself be driven into a political role by escalating terrorism, and therefore, the leaders of the Arab world and Arafat should do their utmost to put an end to this and then the United States should do its utmost to produce a political solution.
Henry A. Kissinger
#53. I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas. And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy.
Henry A. Kissinger
#54. With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears.
Henry A. Kissinger
#55. University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.
Henry A. Kissinger
#56. In the current [Carter] administration, who can use the White House swimming pool and tennis courts is decided at the very highest level. President Ford did not bother himself with such minor details. He let me swim in the pool. He only got upset when I tried to walk across the water.
Henry A. Kissinger
#57. A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
Henry A. Kissinger
#58. I have always expressed respect for those people who make public declarations.
Henry A. Kissinger
#60. Statesmen think in terms of history and view society as an organism. Prophets are different since they believe absolute aims can be achieved in the foreseeable future. More people have been killed by crusaders than by statesmen.
Henry A. Kissinger
#61. It is steady, reliable, tough. It never yields to panic. It is never defeated one-sidedly. It achieves everything attainable by character and tenacity.
Henry A. Kissinger
#62. Henceforth the adequacy of any military establishment will be tested by its ability to preserve the peace.
Henry A. Kissinger
#63. The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.
Henry A. Kissinger
#65. The defining issue is that the government in Taiwan was considered to be the government of all of China, and the authorities in Beijing were not recognized as a government of China. So Taiwan was the residuary for all of China.
Henry A. Kissinger
#66. John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.
Henry A. Kissinger
#68. Far too often, the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side's outpost against the other - it should function as a bridge between them.
Henry A. Kissinger
#69. One has to remember that every progress that has been made towards peace in the Middle East has come under American leadership.
Henry A. Kissinger
#70. The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.
Henry A. Kissinger
#71. I think that his [Obama's] task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period, when really a New World Order can be created.
Henry A. Kissinger
#73. The one thing man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by a World Government, a New World Order.
Henry A. Kissinger
#74. NAFTA represents the single most creative step towards a New World Order.
Henry A. Kissinger
#75. I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
Henry A. Kissinger
#76. Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states.
Henry A. Kissinger
#77. The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.
Henry A. Kissinger
#78. If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.
Henry A. Kissinger
#79. Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity; it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine.
Henry A. Kissinger
#80. For any student of history, change is the law of life. Any attempt to contain it guarantees an explosion down the road; the more rigid the adherence to the status quo, the more violent the ultimate outcome will be.
Henry A. Kissinger
#81. Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.
Henry A. Kissinger
#82. A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.
Henry A. Kissinger
#83. The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.
Henry A. Kissinger
#84. Clearly security without values is like a ship without a rudder. But values without security are like a rudder without a ship.
Henry A. Kissinger
#86. In my view, there's no doubt that the Soviets had infinitely greater trouble holding their structure together than we did.
Henry A. Kissinger
#87. When I became security advisor, I became familiar with the so-called SIOP war plans, I called in Secretary McNamara and asked him what they were hiding from me, because I couldn't believe that the National policy would foresee such a level of destructiveness.
Henry A. Kissinger
#88. Before there was the Soviet Union that could inflame matters. Now you have states not as powerful as the Soviet Union, but states like Iraq, like Iran, and to some extent Syria, having made it possible for some of these groups to operate. So it is a very difficult situation.
Henry A. Kissinger
#93. I think China will do nothing to obstruct it, and they probably will go along with it.
Henry A. Kissinger
#95. You know, this is a very strange phenomenon. I keep reading that in American newspapers, and I keep reading extensive speculations. I meet with the Chinese leaders periodically, and while I don't say they've endorsed the missile shield, it has not been in the forefront of their discussions.
Henry A. Kissinger
#96. Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.
Henry A. Kissinger
#97. Any international system must have two key elements for it to work. One, it has to have a certain equilibrium of power that makes overthrowing the system difficult and costly. Secondly, it has to have a sense of legitimacy.
Henry A. Kissinger
#98. Superstars strive for approbation; heroes walk alone. Superstars crave consensus; heroes define themselves by the judgment of a future they see it as their task to bring about. Superstars seek success in a technique for eliciting support; heroes pursue success as the outgrowth of inner values.
Henry A. Kissinger
#99. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered ...
Henry A. Kissinger
#100. One theory is that we will make war look so attractive that we undermine the deterrent. That's Never Never Land. What we have now would have been enough to deter Hitler. But we are talking in a different order of reality.
Henry A. Kissinger
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