Henry Kissinger Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
In the 1950s and 1960s we put several thousand nuclear weapons into Europe. To be sure, we had no precise idea of what to do with them.

Henry Kissinger
The main advantage of being famous is that when you bore people at dinner parties they think it is their fault.

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Kissinger
History has so far shown us only two roads to international stability: domination and equilibrium.

Henry Kissinger
The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.

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

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
[Richard Nixon] would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.

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
Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

Henry Kissinger
The management of a balance of power is a permanent undertaking, not an exertion that has a foreseeable end.

Henry Kissinger
Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.

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

Henry Kissinger
What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.

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

Henry Kissinger
Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and often actually doesn't help... A fellow who does my job doesn't need to be too intelligent.

Henry Kissinger
Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

Henry Kissinger