Henry A. Kissinger Quotes (105 Quotes)

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

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.

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.

a symbol of integrity, courage and of high quality.

It is hard to believe that Kay is no longer among us. But in a way, she will never leave us. Her place in this country will not be filled, nor the void her death leaves on the lives of her friends,

Because of the axiom that guerrillas win if they do not lose, stalemate is unacceptable, ... the military challenge in Iraq is more elusive.

It is not unreasonable for us to desire some options. Some Europeans, I know, believe it is necessary that we guarantee our own destruction to give them the assurances they claim they need. However, to deprive ourselves of options is to paralyze us. ... What do we mean by control of escalation

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.

It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

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.

We have overcomplicated the issue, ... The United States has been attacked on its territory with thousands of casualties. All the United States is saying it cannot tolerate weapons of mass destruction in that region.

The president is trying to head out in a direction that avoids civil war in Iraq, and that prevents the insurgents from dominating and establishing some sort of fundamentalist regime.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

at a moment when the international situation and the United Nations are in a stage of extraordinary transition.

While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

I think it was a successful trip. The president made the basic point of his strategy and of his concerns in a number of countries,

We had a very interesting and positive discussion, and I appreciate the opportunity to meet with several of the key staff members of the governor's staff, ... A few weeks ago I stood with the governor when I spoke about present events and nuclear strategy

To argue that a collapse of the US in Iraq would not have consequences is simply living in a dream world,

We'll do it in the quickest way possible that is compatible with foreigners and making sure that when the report is finished, there can be no question about the fact that every aspect has been explored, ... Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer.

But we cannot begin with an exit without having first defined what the objective is.

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.

I think the only way to go is to do what they think is the right thing and explain it as well as they can to the American people, as the president is attempting to do with these speeches. The public will not forgive you for losing even if it seems to reflect what they thought they wanted.

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

My heart goes out to the president because I've served in an administration that faced a very divided country in a very difficult set of circumstances.

If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.

Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.

The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

He's between Israel on one side, Iraq and Syria on the other, ... He knows that the Palestinians have tried to overthrow him on a number of occasions, so he has to navigate with extraordinary delicacy.

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.

The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples.

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

I think there is a chance of this working as long as ... at the end of what is being done, the terrorists should not be able to say that they got us to do things that we would not have done except for terrorism,

I hope you don't learn too fast.

We are here because cooperative relations with China are in the American national interest. Every president for 30 years has come to that conclusion, and a rejection of this agreement would be a vote for an adversarial relationship with the most populous nation of China.

Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

If a radical government emerges in Baghdad or if any part of Iraq becomes what Afghanistan used to be, a training ground for terrorists, then this will be a catastrophe for the Islamic world and for Europe, much as they may -- reluctant as they may be to admit it -- and eventually for us.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

Donald Rumsfeld is the most ruthless man I have ever met and I mean that as a compliment.

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

There cannot be a crisis today my schedule is already full

The Chinese have run their system for 3,000 years without advice from the U. S.. They don't like to be lectured by a country only 200 years old.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.