Henry Kissinger Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

Henry Kissinger
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

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

Henry Kissinger
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

Henry Kissinger
America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.

Henry Kissinger
To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall--that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.

Henry Kissinger
It is a mistake to assume that diplomacy can always settle international disputes if there is "good faith" and "willingness to come to an agreement". For in a revolutionary international order, each power will seem to its opponents to lack precisely these qualities. [...] In the absence of an agreement on what constitutes a reasonable demand, diplomatic conferences are occupied with sterile repetitions of basic positions and accusations of bad faith, or allegations of "unreasonableness" and "subversion". They become elaborate stage plays which attempt to attach as yet uncommitted powers to one of the opposing systems.

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.
Memo to President Nixon

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
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
The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.

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
The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.

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
Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered...

Henry Kissinger
The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.

Henry Kissinger
Peace depends ultimately not on political arrangements but on the conscience of mankind.

Henry Kissinger
If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.

Henry Kissinger
Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts... It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

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
High office teaches decision-making, not substance.... A period in high office consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it.

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

Henry Kissinger
A statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his vision and his nation's experience. If his vision gets too far out ahead of his nation's experience, he will lose his mandate. But if he hews too close to the conventional, he will lose control over events.

Henry Kissinger
Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.

Henry Kissinger
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed... History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren't realized... So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.

Henry Kissinger
Mr Clinton does not have the strength of character to be a war criminal.

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. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape — to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.

Henry Kissinger
Every success is usually an admission ticket to a new set of decisions.

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