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. 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
#3. Henry Kissinger is perhaps the best-known American statesman of the 20th century.
Saul David
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public - not while he was alive, at any rate.
Robert Dallek
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.
Christopher Hitchens
#10. In Haig's presence, Kissinger referred pointedly to military men as "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy.
Bob Woodward
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. I wanted to look at how people deal with death ... Why is Henry Kissinger not in jail and Charles Manson is?
John Roecker
#14. Nixon did not anticipate the extent to which Kissinger, whom he barely knew when he appointed him national-security adviser in 1969, would be envious and high-strung - a maintenance project of the first order.
Robert Dallek
#15. Various people have explained why Henry Kissinger is a bad choice to run an investigation into what went wrong on Sept. 11. He's a liar. He's an apologist for corrupt regimes.
Timothy Noah
#16. In this case, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger's orders were being carried out - "anything that flies on anything that moves," an open call for genocide that is rare in the historical record.
Noam Chomsky
#17. Philadelphia's a good science-fiction town. There are many professional writers here, like Michael Swanwick, Tom Purdom, Gregory Frost, Victoria McManus and others. There are professional artists such as Bob Walters and Tess Kissinger and Susan McAninley.
Gardner Dozois
#18. Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there.
Woody Allen
#19. As much as Henry Kissinger wanted to attribute historical movement to impersonal forces, he too conceded to "the difference personalities make".
Walter Isaacson
#20. Flattery was one of Kissinger's principal tools in winning over Nixon, and a tool he employed shamelessly.
Robert Dallek
#21. Republican secretaries of state from Kissinger to Baker, Powell to Rice, President Bush, 71 United States Senators all supported President Obama's new START treaty, but not Mitt Romney.
John F. Kerry
#22. My father left Nazi Germany a year after Dr. Kissinger, and so in my household he was very much an icon. He was a kind of immigrant success story, a refugee success story.
Eugene Jarecki
#23. Historians will look back and say, 'Foreign policy in the Ford presidency was very much dominated by Kissinger, with a kind of continuity from the Nixon period.' Ford is not going to be remembered as a really significant foreign policy maker.
Robert Dallek
#24. Nixon at one point informs Kissinger ... that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves ... genocide.
Noam Chomsky
#25. Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Tom Lehrer
#26. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?
Christopher Hitchens
#27. Dr. Kissinger was a former child. Jerry Ford was a former child. Even F.D.R. was a former child. I retired from the movies in 1949, and I'm still a former child.
Shirley Temple
#28. Given lesser opportunities, Kissinger would have done very well as a talk show host. Fortunately for him, although not so fortunately for the United States, he found his patron in Nelson Rockefeller instead of William Paley.
Lewis H. Lapham
#29. I was fourteen when Kissinger made his secret trip to China, and then there was subsequently Nixon's trip to China, and I was very much seized with an interest in China.
John Pomfret
#30. Kissinger would probably be outraged even if he reread his own memoirs, on the grounds that they are not favorable enough.
Walter Isaacson
#31. I don't think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.
Noam Chomsky
#32. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed.
John Pilger
#33. In particular, it lacked the skills to carry out pacification effectively - or as Kissinger politely put it, the special qualities developed in a decade or more of combat training do not include discriminating political judgment in volatile and complex circumstances.
Niall Ferguson
#34. K [Kissinger] called from New York all disturbed because he felt someone had been getting to the P [President] on Vietnam ... Henry's concerned that the P's looking for a way to bug out and he thinks that would be a disaster now.
Bob Woodward
#35. Vice-President Ford, possibly preparing for higher duties, assessed Kissinger's part in the Syrian-Israeli troop disengagement as the great diplomatic triumph of this century or perhaps any other.
Edwin Newman
#36. On top of my to-do list in preparing for Beijing is 'On China' by Henry Kissinger, who has had firsthand experience with every top Chinese leader since Mao, so his insights are valuable and his access is perhaps unrivaled.
Gary Locke
#37. Nixon's the kind of guy that if you were drowning fifty feet off shore, he'd throw you a thirty foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the President had met you more than half-way.
Mort Sahl
#38. I think Hadley is to Rice as Scowcroft was to Kissinger; not inclined to think or act independently.
Michael Ledeen
#39. Dr. Kissinger was surprised that I knew where Ghana was.
Shirley Temple
#40. The smallest attack option would hit the Soviet Union with almost two thousand weapons; the largest with more than three thousand. The vast scale and inflexibility of the SIOP led Kissinger to describe it as a horror strategy.
Eric Schlosser
#41. The important point was that whatever errors America had made [in Vietnam] "we are so powerful [according to Secretary Kissinger] that Hanoi is simply unable to defeat us militarily" and must therefore eventually be forced to compromise.
William Shawcross
#42. I am not now, and never have been, a girlfriend of Henry Kissinger.
Gloria Steinem
#43. Pride comes before a fall- although in [Henry Kissinger's] case it's more conceit than pride.
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
#44. A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.
Christopher Hitchens
#45. There's a great quote from Henry Kissinger, which I became aware of from reading [Joseph] Heller's Good As Gold. He said: 'Every great achievement was a dream before it became a reality.'
Roy Hodgson
#46. What Americans can't face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.
Robert D. Kaplan
#47. Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today, with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars.
George Galloway
#48. The propaganda system allows the U.S. Ieadership to commit crimes without limit and with no suggestion of misbehavior or criminality; in fact, major war criminals like Henry Kissinger appear regularly on TV to comment on the crimes of the derivative butchers.
Edward S. Herman
#49. I always thought Henry Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and you can't have that in public life.
Seymour Hersh
#50. Nixon's deep antipathy toward Jews is well known, and he took a strange satisfaction in having Kissinger in his inner circle, where he could periodically taunt him.
Robert Dallek
#51. While Pakistan plunged into civil war, Kissinger looked for massacres committed by Bengalis, to generate a moral equivalence that would exonerate Yahya. It would be convenient for Nixon and Kissinger to be able to say that both sides were equally rotten.
Gary J. Bass
#52. Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.
Henry A. Kissinger
#53. 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
#54. Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.
Henry A. Kissinger
#55. The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
Henry A. Kissinger
#56. It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.
Henry A. Kissinger
#57. Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.
Henry A. Kissinger
#58. Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies
Henry Kissinger
#59. 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
#61. 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
#62. Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.
Henry A. Kissinger
#64. The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
Henry Kissinger
#65. Americans have a tendency to believe that when there's a problem there must be a solution.
Henry Kissinger
#66. 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
#67. Power without legitimacy tempts tests of strength; legitimacy without power tepmts empty posturing.
Henry Kissinger
#68. There can't be a crisis next week, my schedule is already full.
Henry Kissinger
#69. 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
#70. I don't consider China a communist state, no. I know that sounds paradoxical, but it's my view.
Henry A. Kissinger
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal
Henry A. Kissinger
#74. 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
#75. The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.
Henry A. Kissinger
#76. Politicians are like dogs ... Their life expectancy is too short for a commitment to be bearable
Henry Kissinger
#77. 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
#78. Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
Henry Kissinger
#79. 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
#80. Postcolonial countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial
Henry Kissinger
#81. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation - at least in the foreign policy world - depend on context and relevance.
Henry Kissinger
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.
Henry A. Kissinger
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. ... Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.
Henry Kissinger
#93. In international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.
Henry Kissinger
#94. What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system
Henry A. Kissinger
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
Henry A. Kissinger
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