Henry Alfred Kissinger was a German-born American politician, diplomat, political scientist, and geopolitical consultant who served as United States secretary of state and national security advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. In the United States, he excelled academically and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950. He earned his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively.

Henry Kissinger played a prominent role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977, pioneering the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrating an opening of relations with the People’s Republic of China, engaging in what became known as shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East to end the Yom Kippur War, and negotiating the Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. After leaving government, he formed Kissinger Associates, an international geopolitical consulting firm.

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Kissinger wrote over a dozen books on diplomatic history and international relations. Kissinger’s legacy is a polarizing subject in American politics. He has been widely considered by scholars to be an effective Secretary of State and condemned for turning a blind eye to war crimes committed by American allies due to his support of a pragmatic approach to politics called Realpolitik. For his actions negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam, Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances.

Some of the best quotes from best quotes from Henry Kissinger are listed below.

“A basic conflict is thus arising over Europe between the interests of Atlantic sea-power, which demand the preservation of vigorous and independent political life on the European peninsula, and the interests of the jealous Eurasian land power, which must always seek to extend itself to the west and will never find a place, short of the Atlantic Ocean, where it can from its own standpoint safely stop.” – Henry Kissinger
“A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.” – Henry Kissinger
“A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.” – Henry Kissinger
“A country whose security depends on producing a genius in each generation sets itself a task no society has ever met.” – Henry Kissinger
“A diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure.” – Henry Kissinger
“A great president must be an educator, bridging the gap between his people’s future and its experience.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“A little uncertainty is good for everyone.” – Henry Kissinger
“A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck’s nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: “We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“A return to the 1967 lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival.” – Henry Kissinger
“Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, you are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets.” – Henry Kissinger
“Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states.” – Henry Kissinger
“Administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.” – Henry Kissinger
“AI can also be used defensively, locating and repairing flaws before they are exploited. But since the attacker can choose the target, AI gives the party on offense an inherent if not insuperable advantage.” – Henry Kissinger
“AI’s brittleness is a reflection of the shallowness of what it learns.” – Henry Kissinger
“Almost all empires were created by force, but none can be sustained by it. Universal rule, to last, needs to translate force into obligation. Otherwise, the energies of the rulers will be exhausted in maintaining their dominance at the expense of their ability to shape the future, which is the ultimate task of statesmanship. Empires persist if repression gives way to consensus.” – Henry Kissinger
“Almost as if according to some natural law, in every century there seems to emerge a country with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to shape the entire international system in accordance with its own values.” – Henry Kissinger
“America has made it very clear in several administrations that if there is an attack by China on Taiwan, the United States is very likely to resist.” – Henry Kissinger
“America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” – Henry Kissinger
“America must distill a common understanding with a country that is the central eventual prize targeted by both the Sunni and the Shia versions of jihad and whose efforts, however circuitous, will be essential in fostering a constructive regional evolution.” – Henry Kissinger
“American approach to policy is pragmatic; China’s is conceptual. America has never had a powerful threatening neighbor; China has never been without a powerful adversary on its borders. Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems. Americans seek an outcome responding to immediate circumstances; Chinese concentrate on evolutionary change.” – Henry Kissinger
“American exceptionalism is missionary. It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world. China’s exceptionalism is cultural.” – Henry Kissinger
“American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“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
“An expert is someone who articulates the needs of those in power.” – Henry Kissinger
“An Iranian moderate is one who has run out of ammunition.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just – not only by leaders, but also by citizens. It must reflect two truths: 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. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent.” – Henry Kissinger
“App developers often rush programs to market, correcting flaws in real time, while aerospace companies do the opposite: test their jets religiously before a single customer ever sets foot.” – Henry Kissinger
“Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.” – Henry Kissinger
“As “the East,” it has never been clearly parallel to “the West.” There has been no common religion, not even one splintered into different branches as is Christianity in the West. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all thrive in different parts of Asia.” – Henry Kissinger
“As nuclear weapons spread into more and more hands, the calculus of deterrence grows increasingly ephemeral and deterrence less and less reliable. In a widely proliferated world, it becomes ever more difficult to decide who is deterring whom and by what calculations.” – Henry Kissinger
“Asia’s International Order and China Of all conceptions of world order in Asia, China operated the longest lasting, the most clearly defined, and the one furthest from Westphalian ideas. China has also taken the most complex journey, from ancient civilization through classical empire, to Communist revolution, to modern great-power status – a course which will have a profound impact on mankind.” – Henry Kissinger
“At any rate, mutually assured destruction was never our policy.” – Henry Kissinger
“At least three viewpoints are identifiable in Arab attitudes: a small, dedicated, but not very vocal group accepting genuine coexistence with Israel and prepared to work for it; a much larger group seeking to destroy Israel by permanent confrontation; and those willing to negotiate with Israel but justifying negotiations, at least domestically, in part as a means to overcome the Jewish state in stages.” – Henry Kissinger
“At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, ‘… what would we gain by helping the French destroy Germany?’ he replied: ‘what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be’.” – Henry Kissinger
“At the end of my November 1973 visit, I suggested to Zhou a hotline between Washington and Beijing as part of an agreement on reducing the risks of accidental war.” – Henry Kissinger
“Baseball is the most intellectual game because most of the action goes on in your head.” – Henry Kissinger
“Because complexity inhibits flexibility, early choices are especially crucial.” – Henry Kissinger
“Because in this view the domestic principles of an Islamic state were divinely ordained, non-Muslim political entities were illegitimate; they could never be accepted by Muslim states as truly equal counterparts. A peaceful world order depended on the ability to forge and expand a unitary Islamic entity, not on an equilibrium of competing parts.” – Henry Kissinger
“Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool.” – Henry Kissinger
“Because the unchecked eastward advance into Manchuria and Korea of Russia – a country that, in Roosevelt’s words, “pursued a policy of consistent opposition to us in the East, and of literally fathomless mendacity”.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.” – Henry Kissinger
“Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.” – Henry Kissinger
“Both sides are reinforced in their suspicions by the military maneuvers and defense programs of the other. Even when they are “normal” – that is, composed of measures a country would reasonably take in defense of national interest as it is generally understood – they are interpreted in terms of worst-case scenarios. Each side has a responsibility for taking care lest its unilateral deployments and conduct escalate into an arms race.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“But unlike Machiavelli, Confucius was concerned more with the cultivation of social harmony than with the machinations of power. His themes were the principles of compassionate rule, the performance of correct rituals, and the inculcation of filial piety.” – Henry Kissinger
“Certainly not a party of the workers and the peasants. In fact, Jiang Zemin in recent weeks has officially said that capitalists and the entrepreneurs should be enrolled in the Communist Party.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“Chess teaches the Clausewitzian concepts of “center of gravity” and the “decisive point” – the game usually beginning as a struggle for the center of the board. Wei qi teaches the art of strategic encirclement.” – Henry Kissinger
“China as the present-day economic superpower is the legacy of Deng Xiaoping.” – Henry Kissinger
“China does not want revolution; it does not want war or revenge; it simply wants the Chinese people to “bid farewell to poverty and enjoy a better life” and for China to become – in contrast to the taunting rejectionism of Mao – “the most responsible, the most civilized, and the most law abiding and orderly member of the international community.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“China is a one-party state. Sooner or later China will get to the point when the new social classes, which have emerged thanks to economic success, will have to be integrated into the political system. There is no guarantee that this process will run smoothly.” – Henry Kissinger
“China produced no religious themes in the Western sense at all. The Chinese never generated a myth of cosmic creation.” – Henry Kissinger
“China, until the modern age, imposed its own matrix of customs and culture on invaders so successfully that they grew indistinguishable from the Chinese people. By contrast, India transcended foreigners not by converting them to Indian religion or culture but by treating their ambitions with supreme equanimity; it integrated their achievements and their diverse doctrines into the fabric of Indian life without ever professing to be especially awed by any of them”.” – Henry Kissinger
“Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.” – Henry Kissinger
“Clearly security without values is like a ship without a rudder. But values without security are like a rudder without a ship.” – Henry Kissinger
“Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.” – Henry Kissinger
“Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided; more often it is a crisis invited.” – Henry Kissinger
“Constantly changing shape as its rulers annexed contiguous territories, Russia was an empire out of scale in comparison with any of the European countries. Moreover, with every new conquest, the character of the state changed as it incorporated another brand-new, restive, non-Russian ethnic group. This was one of the reasons Russia felt obliged to maintain huge armies whose size was unrelated to any plausible threat to its external security.” – Henry Kissinger
“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” – Henry Kissinger
“Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.” – Henry Kissinger
“Countries do not assume burdens because it is fair, only because it is necessary.” – Henry Kissinger
“Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.” – Henry Kissinger
“Created by humans, AI should be overseen by humans. But in our time, one of AI’s challenges is that the skills and resources required to create it are not inevitably paired with the philosophical perspective to understand its broader implications.” – Henry Kissinger
“Democracy is too important to leave up to the votes of the people.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“Does anyone have any questions for my answers?” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“Donald Rumsfeld is the most ruthless man I have ever met? and I mean that as a compliment.” – Henry Kissinger
“Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.” – Henry Kissinger
“Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“Even a paranoid can have enemies.” – Henry Kissinger
“Every age has its leitmotif, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age.” – Henry Kissinger
“Every American president, regardless of party, has said that America has an intense interest in a peaceful resolution. And I think it should be left at that.” – Henry Kissinger
“Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.” – Henry Kissinger
“Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.” – Henry Kissinger
“Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation – at least in the foreign policy world – depend on context and relevance.” – Henry Kissinger
“Failure of the attempt to extinguish the newly declared State of Israel did not lead to a political settlement and the opening of state-to-state relations, as happened in most other postcolonial conflicts in Asia and Africa. Instead, it ushered in a protracted period of political rejection and reluctant armistice agreement against the background of radical groups seeking to force Israel into submission through terrorist campaigns.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“For centuries, the Middle Kingdom had assured its security by playing off distant barbarians against immediate neighbors. Deeply worried about Soviet expansionism, Mao adopted the same strategy in his opening to the United States.” – Henry Kissinger
“For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings.” – Henry Kissinger
“For nearly twenty years, Bismarck preserved the peace and eased international tension with his moderation and flexibility. But he paid the price of misunderstood greatness, for his successors and would-be imitators could draw no better lesson from his example than multiplying arms and waging a war which would cause the suicide of European civilization.” – Henry Kissinger
“For one thousand years, the peoples of Europe had taken for granted that whatever the fluctuations in the balance of power, its constituent elements resided in Europe. The world of the emerging Cold War sought its balances in the conduct and armament of two superpowers: the United States across the Atlantic and the Soviet Union at the geographic fringes of Europe.” – Henry Kissinger
“For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.” – Henry Kissinger
“For Sun Tzu, victory is not simply the triumph of armed forces. Instead, it is the achievement of the ultimate political objectives that the military clash was intended to secure.” – Henry Kissinger
“For the balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux.” – Henry Kissinger
“For the greatest part of humanity and the longest periods of history, empire has been the typical mode of government.” – Henry Kissinger
“For the Soul of France is masterful history, brilliantly researched, and hard to put down.” – Henry Kissinger
“Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing.” – Henry Kissinger
“Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future.” – Henry Kissinger
“George Bernard Shaw: “There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.” – Henry Kissinger
“Germany achieved unification as an affirmation of liberal democracy; it reaffirmed its commitment to European unity as a project of common values and shared development.” – Henry Kissinger
“Good character does not assure worldly success, or triumph in statecraft, but it does provide firm grounding in victory and consolation in failure.” – Henry Kissinger
“Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told Ambassador Robert Murphy, a Dulles emissary, that, if Great Britain did not confront Nasser now, “Britain would become another Netherlands.” – Henry Kissinger
“Hence the task of a strategist is less to analyze a particular situation than to determine its relationship to the context in which it occurs. No particular constellation is ever static; any pattern is temporary and in essence evolving. The strategist must capture the direction of that evolution and make it serve his ends. Sun Tzu uses the word “shi” for that quality, a concept with no direct Western counterpart.” – Henry Kissinger
“Henceforth the adequacy of any military establishment will be tested by its ability to preserve the peace.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“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
“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 Kissinger
“History is the memory of States.” – Henry Kissinger
“History knows no resting places and no plateaus.” – Henry Kissinger
“Holy war occasionally moves the already powerful to even greater efforts; it is doomed, however, whenever it flouts strategic or political realities. And the impetus of the age was national identity and national interests, not global jihad.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.” – Henry Kissinger
“I believe in freedom of expression, and I believe that societies thrive when they permit freedom of expression.” – Henry Kissinger
“I believe it is a mistake to isolate arms control from other areas of policy.” – Henry Kissinger
“I believe that there is a whole set of issues in the world – environment, proliferation, energy, cyberspace – that can only be dealt with on a global basis. The traditional patterns of national rivalry and national competition are not suitable for those cases.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“I do not criticize people who take a public stand on human rights issues. I express my respect for them. But some people are more influential without a public confrontation.” – Henry Kissinger
“I don’t consider China a communist state, no. I know that sounds paradoxical, but it’s my view.” – Henry Kissinger
“I don’t have a brief for every single reaction of Israel, but I think it is important that the political negotiations occur free of the threat of terrorism.” – Henry Kissinger
“I don’t read books, I write them.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“I don’t stand on protocol. Just call me your Excellency.” – Henry Kissinger
“I don’t think we should pay people to fight terrorism. I would be amazed if they asked for anything in return.” – Henry Kissinger
“I go out with actresses because I’m not apt to marry one.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“I had an opportunity to express my views, yes. I agreed with the approach which we took, namely, to make a distinction between the loss of life of the Chinese pilot and our military operations outside territorial waters or territorial limits.” – Henry Kissinger
“I have always expressed respect for those people who make public declarations.” – Henry Kissinger
“I have great respect for the Taiwanese. They have done an extraordinary job. But it was not a sustainable position to say that the legitimate government of China resides in Taiwan, which at that time didn’t have much contact with the mainland.” – Henry Kissinger
“I have learned, as I wrote, that history must be discovered, not declared. It’s an admission that one grows in life.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“I think a resumption of the Cold War would be a historic tragedy. If a conflict is avoidable, on a basis reflecting morality and security, one should try to avoid it.” – Henry Kissinger
“I think China will do nothing to obstruct it, and they probably will go along with it.” – Henry Kissinger
“I want to express here my continuing respect and personal affection for President George W. Bush, who guided America with courage, dignity, and conviction in an unsteady time. His objectives and dedication honored his country even when in some cases they proved unattainable within the American political cycle.” – Henry Kissinger
“I want to thank you for stopping the applause. It is impossible for me to look humble for any period of time.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“If chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign. The chess player aims for total victory. The wei qi player seeks relative advantage.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.” – Henry Kissinger
“If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.” – Henry Kissinger
“If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.” – Henry Kissinger
“If the Emperor strayed from the path of virtue, All Under Heaven would fall into chaos. Even natural catastrophes might signify that disharmony had beset the universe. The existing dynasty would be seen to have lost the “Mandate of Heaven” by which it possessed the right to govern: rebellions would break out, and a new dynasty would restore the Great Harmony of the universe.19.” – Henry Kissinger
“If the gap between the qualities required for election and those essential for the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and sense of history that should be part of foreign policy may be lost – or else the cultivation of these qualities may take so much of a president’s first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for the United States.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“If we do what is necessary, all the odds are in our favor.” – Henry Kissinger
“If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.” – Henry Kissinger
“In 10 years, there will be no more Israel.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“In a nuclear war, even if one side were to come out ahead by systems analytical standards, both sides would be so weakened, that it would – they would be in the position of Europe after the two World Wars.” – Henry Kissinger
“In a world where continental structures like America, China, and maybe India and Brazil have already reached critical mass, how will Europe handle its transition to a regional unit?” – Henry Kissinger
“In any of these evolutions, India will be a fulcrum of twenty-first-century order: an indispensable element, based on its geography, resources, and tradition of sophisticated leadership, in the strategic and ideological evolution of the regions and the concepts of order at whose intersection it stands.” – Henry Kissinger
“In conflict situations, social networking may serve as a platform to reinforce traditional social fissures as much as it dispels them. The widespread sharing of videotaped atrocities in the Syrian civil war appears to have done more to harden the resolve of the warring parties than to stop the killing, while the notorious ISIL has used social media to declare a caliphate and exhort holy war.” – Henry Kissinger
“In crises the most daring course is often safest.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“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
“In my life, I have almost always been on the side of active foreign policy. But you need to know with whom you are cooperating. You need reliable partners.” – Henry Kissinger
“In my particular case foreign policy happens to be my hobby, my consuming interest. I had spent decades studying it.” – Henry Kissinger
“In my view, there’s no doubt that the Soviets had infinitely greater trouble holding their structure together than we did.” – Henry Kissinger
“In other words, each side could arm itself with whatever ideological slogans fulfilled its own domestic necessities, so long as it did not let them interfere with the need for cooperation against the Soviet danger. Ideology would be relegated to domestic management; it took a leave from foreign policy. The ideological armistice was, of course, valid only so long as objectives remained compatible.” – Henry Kissinger
“In our period, new technology has been developed, but remains in need of a guiding philosophy.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“In relations with many domestically weak countries, a radio transmitter can be a more effective form of pressure than a squadron B-52s.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“In the Chinese version of exceptionalism, China did not export its ideas but let others come to seek them.” – Henry Kissinger
“In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.” – Henry Kissinger
“In the hands of a determined Secretary, the Foreign Service can be a splendid instrument, staffed by knowledgeable, discreet, and energetic individuals. They do require constant vigilance lest the convictions that led them into a penurious career tempt them to preempt decision-making.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“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
“Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.” – Henry Kissinger
“Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.” – Henry Kissinger
“Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“It entered into a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with North Korea in 1961, containing a clause on mutual defense against outside attack that is still in force at this writing. But that was more in the nature of the tributary relationship familiar from Chinese history: Beijing offered protection; North Korean reciprocity was irrelevant to the relationship. The Soviet alliance frayed from the very outset largely because Mao would not accept even the hint of subordination.” – Henry Kissinger
“It has the added advantage of being true.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.” – Henry Kissinger
“It is barely conceivable that there are people who like war.” – Henry Kissinger
“It is frankly a mistake of amateurs to believe you can gain the upper hand in a diplomatic negotiation.” – Henry Kissinger
“It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“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 Kissinger
“It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.” – Henry Kissinger
“It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” – Henry Kissinger
“It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.” – Henry Kissinger
“Its requirement of frequent daily prayers made faith a way of life; its emphasis on the identity of religious and political power transformed the expansion of Islam from an imperial enterprise into a sacred obligation.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.” – Henry Kissinger
“Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany at the age of seventy-three, an age by which Bismarck’s career was nearing its end.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.” – Henry Kissinger
“Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“Let us fashion together a new world order.” – Henry Kissinger
“Letting Stalin lead Mao into authorizing the Korean War was the only strategic mistake Mao ever made because, in the end, the Korean War delayed Chinese unification by a century in that it led to America’s commitment to Taiwan.” – Henry Kissinger
“Like the United States, China thought of itself as playing a special role. But it never espoused the American notion of universalism to spread its values around the world. It.” – Henry Kissinger
“Many of the scientists have believed that their contribution to ending the nuclear race is not to let any new weapons to be developed.” – Henry Kissinger
“Mao thought he was inscrutable you know. At least I think he did. it was hard to tell with him.” – Henry Kissinger
“Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” – Henry Kissinger
“Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.” – Henry Kissinger
“Moreover, events often move too quickly to allow for precise calculation; leaders have to make judgments based on intuitions and hypotheses that cannot be proven at the time of decision. Management of risk is as critical to the leader as analytical skill.” – Henry Kissinger
“Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.” – Henry Kissinger
“Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered…” – Henry Kissinger
“NAFTA is a major stepping stone to the New World Order.” – Henry Kissinger
“NAFTA represents the single most creative step towards a New World Order.” – Henry Kissinger
“New methods of accessing and communicating information unite regions as never before and project events globally – but in a manner that inhibits reflection, demanding of leaders that they register instantaneous reactions in a form expressible in slogans. Are we facing a period in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future?” – Henry Kissinger
“No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.” – Henry Kissinger
“No foreign policy – no matter how ingenious – has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.” – Henry Kissinger
“No leader among Russia’s immediate neighbors shares America’s faith in Russian conversion as the key to his country’s security.” – Henry Kissinger
“No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.” – Henry Kissinger
“Now when I bore people at a party, they think it’s their fault.” – Henry Kissinger
“Obama is like a chess player who is playing simultaneous chess and has opened his game with an unusual opening.” – Henry Kissinger
“Observe carefully; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.40.” – Henry Kissinger
“Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.” – Henry Kissinger
“One has to remember that every progress that has been made towards peace in the Middle East has come under American leadership.” – Henry Kissinger
“One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if applied correctly to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old problems of violent conflict. Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted in the Internet age, this theory posits, because “people who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“One thing I don’t want around me is a military intellectual. I don’t have to worry about you on that score.” – Henry Kissinger
“Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy.” – Henry Kissinger
“Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy.” – Henry Kissinger
“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. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent.” – Henry Kissinger
“Our greatest foreign policy problem is our divisions at home. Our greatest foreign policy need is national cohesion and a return to the awareness that in foreign policy we are all engaged in a common national endeavor.” – Henry Kissinger
“Our nation is uniquely endowed to play a creative and decisive role in the new order which is taking form around us.” – Henry Kissinger
“Over time even two armed blind men in a room can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.” – Henry Kissinger
“Peace depends ultimately not on political arrangements but on the conscience of mankind.” – Henry Kissinger
“People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any form that would require me to stop talking for three hours.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“Power is the great aphrodisiac.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The.” – Henry Kissinger
“Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet.” – Henry Kissinger
“Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union.” – Henry Kissinger
“Rather than clear outcomes, however, we are more likely to arrive at a series of dilemmas with imperfect answers.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“Realism in foreign policy means careful consideration of all aspects pertinent to the issue, before taking a decision. This is the only way you can move from where you are to someplace else.” – Henry Kissinger
“Relations between China and the United States need not – and should not – become a zero-sum game… Key issues on the international front are global in nature. Consensus may prove difficult, but confronation on these issues is self-defeating.” – Henry Kissinger
“Religion and politics never merged into a single construct, leading to Voltaire’s truthful jest that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.” – Henry Kissinger
“Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“Russian rulers appealed to their people on the basis of their endurance, not their greatness. Russian diplomacy relied, to an extraordinary extent, on superior power. Russia rarely had allies among countries where it had not stationed military forces. Russian diplomacy tended to be power-oriented, tenaciously holding on to fixed positions and transforming foreign policy into trench warfare.” – Henry Kissinger
“Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies.” – Henry Kissinger
“Since no grand resolution was available, the Gong memorial established a priority among the dangers, in effect based on the principle of defeating the near barbarians with the assistance of the far barbarians. It was a classical Chinese strategy that would be revisited roughly a hundred years later by Mao.” – Henry Kissinger
“So long as strategic nuclear weapons were the principal element of Europe’s defense, the objective of European policy was primarily psychological: to oblige the United States to treat Europe as an extension of itself in case of an emergency.” – Henry Kissinger
“Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.” – Henry Kissinger
“Spanish territory in Florida and Texas – the.” – Henry Kissinger
“Statesman create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator.” – Henry Kissinger
“Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“Still, China was not a missionary society in the Western sense of the term. It sought to induce respect, not conversion; that subtle line could never be crossed. Its mission was its performance, which foreign societies were expected to recognize and acknowledge. It was possible for another country to become a friend, even an old friend, but it could never be treated as China’s peer.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“The ability to enable people to gather in a square differs from building new institutions of state.” – Henry Kissinger
“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.” – Henry Kissinger
“The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of all books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking – the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future.” – Henry Kissinger
“The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.” – Henry Kissinger
“The American formal position has been that we oppose violence by governments against their people. That principle should not be abandoned.” – Henry Kissinger
“The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“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 Kissinger
“The Art of War articulates a doctrine less of territorial conquest than of psychological dominance; it was the way the North Vietnamese fought America.” – Henry Kissinger
“The bargaining position of the victor always diminishes with time. Whatever is not exacted during the shock of defeat becomes increasingly difficult to attain later.” – Henry Kissinger
“The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“The elderly are useless eaters.” – Henry Kissinger
“The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.” – Henry Kissinger
“The enemies you make by taking a decided stand generally have more respect for you than the friends you make by being on the fence.” – Henry Kissinger
“The essence of building a constructive world order is that no single country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in the immediate post-Cold War period, when it was materially and psychologically preeminent.” – Henry Kissinger
“The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.” – Henry Kissinger
“The first reactions are often instinctive. So, one of the first things we said was that the Chinese had no right to inspect the plane, and that we had a sovereign right to. I don’t know what the legal position is, but it was surely psychologically absolutely the unwise thing to do.” – Henry Kissinger
“The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive.” – Henry Kissinger
“The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily.” – Henry Kissinger
“The governments on both sides remained committed to the need for cooperation, but they could not control all the ways the countries impinged on each other. It is the unsolved challenge of Chinese-American relations.” – Henry Kissinger
“The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.” – Henry Kissinger
“The history of things that didn’t happen has never been written.” – Henry Kissinger
“The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.” – Henry Kissinger
“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.” – Henry Kissinger
“The irony is that even as digitization is making an increasing amount of information available, it is diminishing the space required for deep, concentrated thought.” – Henry Kissinger
“The Israelis want security. The Arabs want dignity. And they consider the demands of each other as incompatible.” – Henry Kissinger
“The key decision for a statesman is whether to commit his nation or not. There is no middle course. Once a great nation commits itself, it must prevail. It will acquire no kudos for translating its inner doubts into hesitation.” – Henry Kissinger
“The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.” – Henry Kissinger
“The Marshall Plan and NATO succeeded because a political tradition of government remained in Europe, even if impaired.” – Henry Kissinger
“The Middle East is caught in a confrontation akin to – but broader than – Europe’s pre-Westphalian wars of religion. Domestic and international conflicts reinforce each other. Political, sectarian, tribal, territorial, ideological, and traditional national-interest disputes merge. Religion is “weaponized” in the service of geopolitical objectives; civilians are marked for extermination based on their sectarian affiliation.” – Henry Kissinger
“The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook.” – Henry Kissinger
“The nature of these challenges was not singular to the 1930s. 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. The interwar years’ toxic mixture of facile pacifism, geopolitical imbalance, and allied disunity allowed these forces a free hand.” – Henry Kissinger
“The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.” – Henry Kissinger
“The nuclear weapons were not useful for the achievement of political objectives.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“The penalty for excessive ambition – what the Greeks called hubris – is exhaustion, while the price for resting on one’s laurels is progressive insignificance and eventual decay.” – Henry Kissinger
“The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”: Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – Henry Kissinger
“The position is that stability and peace in Asia depend on a cooperative relationship between China and the United States.” – Henry Kissinger
“The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.” – Henry Kissinger
“The pursuit of transparency and connectivity in all aspects of existence, by destroying privacy, inhibits the development of personalities with the strength to take lonely decisions.” – Henry Kissinger
“The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.” – Henry Kissinger
“The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.” – Henry Kissinger
“The scientist thus learns truth experimentally or mathematically; the strategist reasons at least partly by analogy with the past – first establishing which events are comparable and which prior conclusions remain relevant.” – Henry Kissinger
“The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples.” – Henry Kissinger
“The Soviet Union would never be bound by agreements, Deng warned; it understood only the language of countervailing force.” – Henry Kissinger
“The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.” – Henry Kissinger
“The statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between his nation’s experience and his vision.” – Henry Kissinger
“The study of history offers no manual of instructions that can be applied automatically; history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable situations.” – Henry Kissinger
“The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.” – Henry Kissinger
“The task of the leader is to get people from where they are to where they have not been.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“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
“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 Kissinger
“The two sides need to absorb the history of the decade before World War I, when the gradual emergence of an atmosphere of suspicion and latent confrontation escalated into catastrophe. The leaders of Europe trapped themselves by their military planning and inability to separate the tactical from the strategic.” – Henry Kissinger
“The United States has every reason from history and geopolitics to bolster the European Union and prevent its drifting off into a geopolitical vacuum; the United States, if separated from Europe in politics, economics, and defense, would become geopolitically an island off the shores of Eurasia, and Europe itself could turn into an appendage to the reaches of Asia and the Middle East.” – Henry Kissinger
“The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.” – Henry Kissinger
“The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn’t make it.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane: Either you have diarrhea, or you’re anxious to meet people who do.” – Henry Kissinger
“There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.” – Henry Kissinger
“There is no realism without an element of idealism.” – Henry Kissinger
“This country cannot afford to tear itself apart on a partisan basis on issues so vital to our national security.” – Henry Kissinger
“To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“To revolutionaries the significant reality is the world which they are fighting to bring about, not the world they are fighting to overcome.” – Henry Kissinger
“To understand a man,’ Napoleon is said to have observed, ‘look at the world when he was twenty.’ Thatcher had turned twenty in 1945.” – Henry Kissinger
“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. And the statesman must then inspire his people to persist in the endeavor.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. they may deviate from the previous trajectory only within a finite margin. the great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. if they fall short, society stagnates. if they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“Two different people appealing to a search engine with the same question do not necessarily receive the same answers. The concept of truth is being relativized and individualized – losing its universal character.” – Henry Kissinger
“Under the ayatollahs’ concept of policy, the dispute with the West is not a matter of specific technical concessions or negotiating formulas but a contest over the nature of world order.” – Henry Kissinger
“United States would become the indispensable defender of the order Europe designed.” – Henry Kissinger
“University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” – Henry Kissinger
“University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.” – Henry Kissinger
“Viewed through the lens of deterrence, seeming weakness could have the same consequences as an actual deficiency.” – Henry Kissinger
“We are all the President’s men.” – Henry Kissinger
“We are doomed to coexist.” – Henry Kissinger
“We are not just any nation.” – Henry Kissinger
“We attempted to try to solve every problem in the world, out of a sense of moral obligations, and attitudes, and our history. But no country can solve every problem without exhausting itself. Therefore, we have to establish priorities.” – Henry Kissinger
“We believe that peace is at hand.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.” – Henry Kissinger
“We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.” – Henry Kissinger
“We shouldn’t be afraid of atomic bombs and missiles. No matter what kind of war breaks out – conventional or thermonuclear – we’ll win. As for China, if the imperialists unleash war on us, we may lose more than three hundred million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“Well, the capacity of French intellectuals to understand a Texan way of thinking is finite.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“What degree of inferiority would remain meaningful in a crisis in which each side used its capabilities to the fullest?” – Henry Kissinger
“What distinguishes Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military.” – Henry Kissinger
“What is new about the emerging world order is that, for the first time, the United States can neither withdraw from the world nor dominate it.” – Henry Kissinger
“What Nixon sought throughout the Cold War was a stable international order for a world filled with nuclear weapons.” – Henry Kissinger
“What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.” – Henry Kissinger
“What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system.” – Henry Kissinger
“Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“When information is contextualized, it becomes knowledge. When knowledge compels convictions, it becomes wisdom.” – Henry Kissinger
“When information is contextualized, it becomes knowledge. When knowledge compels convictions, it becomes wisdom. Yet the internet inundates users with the opinions of thousands, even millions, of other users, depriving them of the solitude required for sustained reflection that, historically, has led to the development of convictions.” – Henry Kissinger
“When statesmen want to gain time, they offer to talk.” – Henry Kissinger
“When the Chinese court deigned to send envoys abroad, they were not diplomats, but “Heavenly Envoys” from the Celestial Court.” – Henry Kissinger
“When urged to adhere to the international system’s “rules of the game” and “responsibilities,” the visceral reaction of many Chinese – including senior leaders – has been profoundly affected by the awareness that China has not participated in making the rules of the system. They are asked – and, as a matter of prudence, have agreed – to adhere to rules they had had no part in making.” – Henry Kissinger
“When you travel as secretary, one problem you have is that the press comes with you and wants an immediate result because it justifies their trip. And sometimes the best result is that you don’t try to get a result but try to get an understanding for the next time you go to them.” – Henry Kissinger
“Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.” – Henry Kissinger
“Whenever peace – conceived as the avoidance of war – has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community. Whenever the international order has acknowledged that certain principles could not be compromised even for the sake of peace, stability based on an equilibrium of forces was at least conceivable.” – Henry Kissinger
“Where Western strategists reflect on the means to assemble superior power at the decisive point, Sun Tzu addresses the means of building a dominant political and psychological position, such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone conclusion. Western strategists test their maxims by victories in battles; Sun Tzu tests by victories where battles have become unnecessary.” – Henry Kissinger
“While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.” – Henry Kissinger
“Who controls money controls the world.” – Henry Kissinger
“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.” – Henry Kissinger
“Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“With data and computing requirements limiting the development of more advanced AI, devising training methods that use less data and less computer power is a critical frontier.” – Henry Kissinger
“With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears.” – Henry Kissinger
“Withdrawal of US troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public: The more US troops come home, the more will be demanded.” – Henry Kissinger
“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
“World order cannot be achieved by any one country acting alone. To achieve a genuine world order, its components, while maintaining their own values, need to acquire a second culture that is global, structural, and juridical – a concept of order that transcends the perspective and ideals of any one region or nation.” – Henry Kissinger
“World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable to the entire world.” – Henry Kissinger
“World population needs to be decreased by 50%.” – Henry Kissinger
“You become a superpower by being strong but also by being wise and by being farsighted. But no state is strong or wise enough to create a world order alone.” – Henry Kissinger
“You can’t make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“You must never forget that the unification of Germany is more important than the development of the European Union, that the fall of the Soviet Union is more important than the unification of Germany, and that the rise of India and China is more important than the fall of the Soviet Union.” – Henry Kissinger
“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 Kissinger
“You should not think that you can shape history only by your will. This is also why I’m against the concept of intervention when you don’t know its ultimate implications.” – Henry Kissinger

Tags: Quotes