Henry Kissinger Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Henry Kissinger
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

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

Henry Kissinger
If Tehran insists on combining the Persian imperial tradition with contemporary Islamic fervor, then a collision with America — and, indeed, with its negotiating partners of the Six — is unavoidable. Iran simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region of such importance to the rest of the world.

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

Henry Kissinger
The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.

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

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
A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.

Henry Kissinger
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of 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
The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.

Henry Kissinger
We are the President's men and we must behave accordingly.

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

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

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

Henry Kissinger
The wisest of realists are those who recognize that fate can indeed be shaped by human faith and courage.

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
If you believe that their real intention is to kill you, it isn't unreasonable to believe that they would lie to you.

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
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
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