Top 91 Henry Kissinger Quotes
#1. Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies
Henry Kissinger
#2. Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate's convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a "big data" research effort into individuals' likely preferences and prejudices?
Henry Kissinger
#4. The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
Henry Kissinger
#5. Americans have a tendency to believe that when there's a problem there must be a solution.
Henry Kissinger
#6. In his essay, 'Perpetual Peace,' the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.
Henry Kissinger
#7. Power without legitimacy tempts tests of strength; legitimacy without power tepmts empty posturing.
Henry Kissinger
#8. There can't be a crisis next week, my schedule is already full.
Henry Kissinger
#9. A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the harmony of the universe.
Henry Kissinger
#10. Later I learned to improve my forecasting - if necessary by asking the visitor in advance what subjects he intended to raise with Nixon. In
Henry Kissinger
#11. Politicians are like dogs ... Their life expectancy is too short for a commitment to be bearable
Henry Kissinger
#12. The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century's decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.
Henry Kissinger
#13. Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
Henry Kissinger
#14. Postcolonial countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial
Henry Kissinger
#15. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation - at least in the foreign policy world - depend on context and relevance.
Henry Kissinger
#16. In effect, none of the most important countries which must build a new world order have had any experience with the multistate system that is emerging. Never before has a new world order had to be assembled from so many different perceptions, or on so global a scale.
Henry Kissinger
#17. ... Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.
Henry Kissinger
#18. In international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.
Henry Kissinger
#19. Historically, alliances had been formed to augment a nation's strength in case of war; as World War I approached, the primary motive for war was to strengthen the alliances.
Henry Kissinger
#20. Will the emerging Europe become an active participant in the construction of a new international order, or will it consume itself on its own internal issues?
Henry Kissinger
#21. The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
Henry Kissinger
#22. Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.
Henry Kissinger
#23. To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires character and courage: character because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first.
Henry Kissinger
#24. Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems.
Henry Kissinger
#25. The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.
Henry Kissinger
#26. The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other's domestic affairs and checking each other's ambitions through a general equilibrium of power.
Henry Kissinger
#27. The issues are too important to be left for the voters.
Henry Kissinger
#28. Yet after withdrawing from three wars in two generations - each begun with idealistic aspirations and widespread public support but ending in national trauma - America struggles to define the relationship between its power (still vast) and its principles.
Henry Kissinger
#29. The lowest form of war is To attack Cities. Siege warfare Is a last resort ... The Skillful Strategist Defeats the enemy Without doing battle, Captures the city Without laying siege, Overthrows the enemy state Without protracted war.34
Henry Kissinger
#30. For Roosevelt, if a nation was unable or unwilling to act to defend its own interests, it could not expect others to respect them. Inevitably,
Henry Kissinger
#31. The Soviet Union would never be bound by agreements, Deng warned; it understood only the language of countervailing force.
Henry Kissinger
#32. Torn between obsessive insecurity and proselytizing zeal, between the requirements of Europe and the temptations of Asia, the Russian Empire always had a role in the European equilibrium but was never emotionally a part of it.
Henry Kissinger
#33. When the Chinese court deigned to send envoys abroad, they were not diplomats, but "Heavenly Envoys" from the Celestial Court.
Henry Kissinger
#34. Cold War. China, though technically an ally of the Soviet Union, was in quest of maneuvering
Henry Kissinger
#35. The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive.
Henry Kissinger
#36. The kowtow was symbolically voluntary: it was the representative deference of a people that had been not so much conquered as awed. The tribute presented to China on such occasions was often exceeded in value by the Emperor's return gifts.
Henry Kissinger
#37. It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.
Henry Kissinger
#38. May not lead to reduction in U.S. casualties until its final stages, as our casualty rate may be unrelated to the total number of American troops in South Vietnam. To kill about 150 U.S. soldiers a week, the enemy needs to attack only a small portion of our forces ... .
Henry Kissinger
#40. Especially when ultimate decisions of peace and war are involved, a strategist must be aware that bluffs may be called and must take into account the impact on his future credibility of an empty threat.
Henry Kissinger
#41. For the greatest part of humanity and the longest periods of history, empire has been the typical mode of government.
Henry Kissinger
#42. In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.
Henry Kissinger
#43. She had interviewed leading personalities all over the world. Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown to me.
Henry Kissinger
#44. Every victory is only the price of admission to a more difficult problem
Henry Kissinger
#45. If Chinese exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire, Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it.
Henry Kissinger
#46. United States would become the indispensable defender of the order Europe designed.
Henry Kissinger
#47. Woe to the statesman whose arguments for entering a war are not as convincing at its end as they were at the beginning, Bismarck had cautioned.
Henry Kissinger
#48. I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
Henry Kissinger
#49. It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.
Henry Kissinger
#50. The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small
Henry Kissinger
#51. It is . . . a melancholy fact that the countries which are most humanitarian, which are most interested in internal improvement, tend to grow weaker compared with the other countries which possess a less altruistic civilization . .
Henry Kissinger
#52. they agreed to cede a third of European Russia to German control in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918.
Henry Kissinger
#53. Realpolitik for Bismarck depended on flexibility and on the ability to exploit every available option without the constraint of ideology.
Henry Kissinger
#54. The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat.
Henry Kissinger
#55. It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.
Henry Kissinger
#56. Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.
Henry Kissinger
#57. Helmut, if I had known that one can make it to 90 on 60 cigarettes a day, I would have started smoking 30 years ago. [at Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's 90th birthday]
Henry Kissinger
#58. A Harvard study has shown that in fifteen cases in history where a rising and an established power interacted, ten ended in war.
Henry Kissinger
#60. Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.
Henry Kissinger
#61. In Washington ... the appearance of power is therefore almost as important as the reality of it. In fact, the appearance is frequently its essential reality
Henry Kissinger
#62. America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests
Henry Kissinger
#63. history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable situations.
Henry Kissinger
#64. Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.
Henry Kissinger
#65. Upon learning of Cardinal Richelieu's death, Pope Urban VIII is alleged to have said, If there is a God, the Cardinal de Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not ... well, he had a successful life.
Henry Kissinger
#66. A country whose security depends on producing a genius in each generation sets itself a task no society has ever met.
Henry Kissinger
#67. Poor old Germany. Too big for Europe, too small for the world
Henry Kissinger
#69. In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role.
Henry Kissinger
#70. Since Peter the Great, Russia had been expanding at the rate of one Belgium per year.
Henry Kissinger
#71. Order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace.
Henry Kissinger
#72. The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Henry Kissinger
#73. Because complexity inhibits flexibility, early choices are especially crucial.
Henry Kissinger
#74. Roosevelt returned to this theme in his fourth inaugural address in 1945: We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that "The only way to have a friend is to be one." We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust or with fear.
Henry Kissinger
#75. Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy.
Henry Kissinger
#76. A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security
Henry Kissinger
#77. The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault.
Henry Kissinger
#78. If the major powers come to practice foreign policies of manipulating a multiplicity of subsovereign units observing ambiguous and often violent rules of conduct, many based on extreme articulations of divergent cultural experiences, anarchy is certain.
Henry Kissinger
#79. In the vacuum of authority following the demonstrations' initial success, factions from the pre-uprising period are often in a position to shape the outcome.
Henry Kissinger
#80. In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it.
Henry Kissinger
#81. The highest form of warfare Is to attack [the enemy's] Strategy itself; The next, To attack [his] Alliances. The next, To attack Armies;
Henry Kissinger
#82. Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.
Henry Kissinger
#83. Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God
Henry Kissinger
#86. But Japan drew from the challenge the opposite conclusion as China: it threw open its doors to foreign technology and overhauled its institutions in an attempt to replicate the Western powers' rise.
Henry Kissinger
#88. If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint.
Henry Kissinger
#89. The war is just when the intention that causes it to be undertaken is just. The will is therefore the principle element that must be considered, not the means ... He who intends to kill the guilty sometimes faultlessly shed the blood of the innocents ... '
In short, the end justifies the means.
Henry Kissinger
#90. Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy.
Henry Kissinger
#91. When Germany declared itself ready to discuss an armistice, Wilson refused to negotiate until the Kaiser abdicated.
Henry Kissinger
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