Top 100 Kissinger's Quotes
#1. Flattery was one of Kissinger's principal tools in winning over Nixon, and a tool he employed shamelessly.
Robert Dallek
#2. 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
#3. Pride comes before a fall- although in [Henry Kissinger's] case it's more conceit than pride.
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. In international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.
Henry Kissinger
#7. [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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. Jews were segregated from 1933 on. We could only play against other Jewish teams. This wasn't just social segregation; this was the beginning of the extermination of the Jews. That's why my family left Germany in 1938.
Henry A. Kissinger
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. In Haig's presence, Kissinger referred pointedly to military men as "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy.
Bob Woodward
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.
Christopher Hitchens
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system
Henry A. Kissinger
#28. 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
#29. If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.
Henry A. Kissinger
#30. Well, he keeps saying that, and as defense secretary, of course he has to think of a lot of potential enemies. I do not think it's a wise course to articulate this or to base our policy on it. And I do not see under modern circumstances what we would be fighting about.
Henry A. Kissinger
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.
Henry A. Kissinger
#34. [The New World Order] cannot happen without U.S. participation, as we are the most significant single component. Yes, there will be a New World Order, and it will force the United States to change it's perceptions.
Henry A. Kissinger
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault.
Henry Kissinger
#38. In my view, there's no doubt that the Soviets had infinitely greater trouble holding their structure together than we did.
Henry A. Kissinger
#39. I wouldn't say it's a split. It's a difference of emphasis. It does exist between, I would say, the State Department and the Defense Department.
Henry A. Kissinger
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. You're 18 points down [in the polls] ... You might as well do what's right.
Henry A. Kissinger
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.
Henry A. Kissinger
#49. 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
#51. 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
#53. Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.
Henry A. Kissinger
#54. 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
#55. I don't consider China a communist state, no. I know that sounds paradoxical, but it's my view.
Henry A. Kissinger
#56. 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
#57. Henry Kissinger is perhaps the best-known American statesman of the 20th century.
Saul David
#58. There can't be a crisis next week, my schedule is already full.
Henry Kissinger
#59. Power without legitimacy tempts tests of strength; legitimacy without power tepmts empty posturing.
Henry Kissinger
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Americans have a tendency to believe that when there's a problem there must be a solution.
Henry Kissinger
#63. The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
Henry Kissinger
#65. 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
#66. 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
#68. 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
#69. Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies
Henry Kissinger
#70. Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.
Henry A. Kissinger
#71. It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.
Henry A. Kissinger
#72. The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
Henry A. Kissinger
#73. Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.
Henry A. Kissinger
#74. 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
#75. Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.
Henry A. Kissinger
#76. 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
#77. Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public - not while he was alive, at any rate.
Robert Dallek
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.
Henry A. Kissinger
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#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. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. ... Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.
Henry Kissinger
#90. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation - at least in the foreign policy world - depend on context and relevance.
Henry Kissinger
#91. Postcolonial countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial
Henry Kissinger
#92. 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
#93. Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
Henry Kissinger
#94. 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
#95. Politicians are like dogs ... Their life expectancy is too short for a commitment to be bearable
Henry Kissinger
#96. 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
#97. The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.
Henry A. Kissinger
#98. 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
#99. To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal
Henry A. Kissinger
#100. 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
