Henry A. Kissinger Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by Henry A. Kissinger:
The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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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 A. Kissinger
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There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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Power is the great aphrodisiac.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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Even a paranoid can have enemies.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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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 A. Kissinger
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Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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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 A. Kissinger
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Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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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.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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We are all the President's men.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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In crises the most daring course is often safest.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.
~Henry A. Kissinger
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