Henry Kissinger Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

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

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
It is barely conceivable that there are people who like war.

Henry Kissinger
For other nations utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is no farther than the intensity of their commitment.
Sometimes misquoted as: [...] for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

Henry Kissinger