Top 100 Kissinger Quotes
#1. Henry Kissinger is possessed of a truly superior intelligence, in addition to which he has two qualities which, unfortunately, many great men lack: he is able to listen and he has a very subtle sense of humour.
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
#2. Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.
Henry A. Kissinger
#3. 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
#4. Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.
Henry A. Kissinger
#5. The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
Henry A. Kissinger
#6. It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.
Henry A. Kissinger
#7. Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.
Henry A. Kissinger
#8. Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies
Henry Kissinger
#9. 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
#11. People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.
Henry A. Kissinger
#12. Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.
Henry A. Kissinger
#14. The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
Henry Kissinger
#15. Americans have a tendency to believe that when there's a problem there must be a solution.
Henry Kissinger
#16. I think Henry Kissinger grew up with that odd mix of ego and insecurity that comes from being the smartest kid in the class. From really knowing you're more awesomely intelligent than anybody else, but also being the guy who got beaten up for being Jewish.
Walter Isaacson
#17. 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
#18. Power without legitimacy tempts tests of strength; legitimacy without power tepmts empty posturing.
Henry Kissinger
#19. There can't be a crisis next week, my schedule is already full.
Henry Kissinger
#20. Henry Kissinger is perhaps the best-known American statesman of the 20th century.
Saul David
#21. 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
#22. I don't consider China a communist state, no. I know that sounds paradoxical, but it's my view.
Henry A. Kissinger
#23. 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
#24. In a diplomatic negotiation, you always meet the same the other side all the time. Even if you should succeed in outsmarting him or in pressuring him, it only sets up a cycle in which he will try to get even.
Henry A. Kissinger
#25. People say: But photographs are all lies. That's not the point. The lie is a truth, too. How the hell are we going to know what Kissinger looks like? Well, the photograph tells us one version; I'm trying to tell it also, but differently.
Leon Golub
#26. To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal
Henry A. Kissinger
#27. 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
#28. The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.
Henry A. Kissinger
#29. I'd like President Bush to think maybe there's another way to think, that maybe Kissinger was wrong when he says we had to go in there because he was wrong about Vietnam.
F. Murray Abraham
#30. Politicians are like dogs ... Their life expectancy is too short for a commitment to be bearable
Henry Kissinger
#31. 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
#32. Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
Henry Kissinger
#33. 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
#34. Postcolonial countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial
Henry Kissinger
#35. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation - at least in the foreign policy world - depend on context and relevance.
Henry Kissinger
#36. Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public - not while he was alive, at any rate.
Robert Dallek
#37. History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.
Henry A. Kissinger
#38. 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
#39. In relations with many domestically weak countries, a radio transmitter can be a more effective form of pressure than a squadron B-52s.
Henry A. Kissinger
#40. I have learned, as I wrote, that history must be discovered, not declared. It's an admission that one grows in life.
Henry A. Kissinger
#41. Sketches Einstein: His Life and Universe A Benjamin Franklin Reader Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Kissinger: A Biography The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (with Evan Thomas)
Walter Isaacson
#42. 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
#43. To revolutionaries the significant reality is the world which they are fighting to bring about, not the world they are fighting to overcome.
Henry A. Kissinger
#44. The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.
Henry A. Kissinger
#45. In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.
Henry A. Kissinger
#46. Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?
Henry A. Kissinger
#47. 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
#48. ... Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.
Henry Kissinger
#49. In international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.
Henry Kissinger
#50. What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system
Henry A. Kissinger
#51. What China would do, I cannot predict. China has all but given up the claim to the use of force, except in the circumstance of Taiwan declaring its independence. That is a huge step forward over what the situation was many years ago.
Henry A. Kissinger
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman.
Eugene Jarecki
#56. Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.
Christopher Hitchens
#57. 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
#58. The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
Henry A. Kissinger
#59. 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
#61. In Haig's presence, Kissinger referred pointedly to military men as "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy.
Bob Woodward
#62. Realism in foreign policy is made up of a clear set of values, since difficult foreign policy decisions are often decided with the narrowest of majorities. Without any sense of what is right and wrong, one would drown in a flood of difficult and pragmatic decisions.
Henry A. Kissinger
#63. No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
Henry A. Kissinger
#64. The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
Henry Kissinger
#66. 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
#67. Henry Kissinger may have wished I had presented him as a combination of Charles DeGaulle and Disraeli, but I didn't ... out of respect for DeGaulle and Disraeli. I described him as a cowboy because that is how he describes himself. If I were a cowboy I would be offended.
Oriana Fallaci
#68. 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
#69. For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.
Henry A. Kissinger
#70. Well, the capacity of French intellectuals to understand a Texan way of thinking is finite.
Henry A. Kissinger
#71. The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples.
Henry A. Kissinger
#72. 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
#73. Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
Henry A. Kissinger
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#78. I see the future of China as growth. I think that historically China has often gone through periods of consolidation, and then periods of sort of weakening central authority. They undoubtedly face tremendous challenges.
Henry A. Kissinger
#79. In my particular case foreign policy happens to be my hobby, my consuming interest. I had spent decades studying it.
Henry A. Kissinger
#80. It is frankly a mistake of amateurs to believe you can gain the upper hand in a diplomatic negotiation.
Henry A. Kissinger
#81. 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
#82. The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.
Henry Kissinger
#83. 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
#84. I do not stand on protocol. If you just call me Excellency, it will be okay.
Henry A. Kissinger
#85. Generally it must be stated that realpolitik has been better at dividing than at ruling. Take it as a whole since Kissinger called on the Shah in 1972, and see what the harvest has been.
Christopher Hitchens
#87. I wanted to look at how people deal with death ... Why is Henry Kissinger not in jail and Charles Manson is?
John Roecker
#88. Donald Rumsfeld is the most ruthless man I have ever met? and I mean that as a compliment.
Henry A. Kissinger
#89. 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
#90. Taiwan will probably not declare independence. The question isn't independence. The issue is whether Taiwan will declare itself as a sovereign separate state. That will start a huge crisis if that happens.
Henry A. Kissinger
#92. If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.
Henry A. Kissinger
#94. High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.
Henry A. Kissinger
#95. The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.
Henry A. Kissinger
#96. The issues are too important to be left for the voters.
Henry Kissinger
#97. Peace depends ultimately not on political arrangements but on the conscience of mankind.
Henry A. Kissinger
#98. Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.
Henry A. Kissinger
#99. 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
#100. 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
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