Henry Kissinger - White House years (1979)

17 Sourced Quotes

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

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 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
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
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
Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided; more often it is a crisis invited.

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

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

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
History knows no resting places and no plateaus.

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

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

Henry Kissinger