Henry Kissinger - Years of Upheaval (1982)

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

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
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
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
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
Nixon had three goals: to win by the biggest electoral landslide in history; to be remembered as a peacemaker; and to be accepted by the 'Establishment' as an equal. He achieved all these objectives at the end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973. And he lost them all two months later-partly because he turned a dream into an obsession.

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
In the hands of a determined Secretary, the Foreign Service can be a splendid instrument, staffed by knowledgeable, discreet, and energetic individuals. They do require constant vigilance lest the convictions that led them into a penurious career tempt them to preempt decision-making.

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