Top 380 Henry Kissinger Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.”

— Henry Kissinger

52. “The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.”

— Henry Kissinger

53. “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

54. “You become a superpower by being strong but also by being wise and by being farsighted. But no state is strong or wise enough to create a world order alone.”

— Henry Kissinger

55. “Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.”

— Henry Kissinger

56. “Statesmen think in terms of history and view society as an organism. Prophets are different since they believe absolute aims can be achieved in the foreseeable future. More people have been killed by crusaders than by statesmen.”

— Henry Kissinger

57. “An expert is someone who articulates the needs of those in power.”

— Henry Kissinger

58. “If chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign. The chess player aims for total victory. The wei qi player seeks relative advantage.”

— Henry Kissinger

59. “I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas. And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy.”

— Henry Kissinger

60. “The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.”

— Henry Kissinger

61. “While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.”

— Henry Kissinger

62. “NAFTA represents the single most creative step towards a New World Order.”

— Henry Kissinger

63. “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

64. “There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane: Either you have diarrhea, or you’re anxious to meet people who do.”

— Henry Kissinger

65. “You can’t make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria.”

— Henry Kissinger

66. “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

— Henry Kissinger

67. “In a diplomatic negotiation, you always meet the same the other side all the time. Even if you should succeed in outsmarting him or in pressuring him, it only sets up a cycle in which he will try to get even.”

— Henry Kissinger

68. “How to Achieve The New World Order.”

— Henry Kissinger

69. “The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.”

— Henry Kissinger

70. “China is a one party state. Sooner or later China will get to the point when the new social classes, which have emerged thanks to economic success, will have to be integrated into the political system. There is no guarantee that this process will run smoothly.”

— Henry Kissinger

71. “The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.”

— Henry Kissinger

72. “For any student of history, change is the law of life. Any attempt to contain it guarantees an explosion down the road; the more rigid the adherence to the status quo, the more violent the ultimate outcome will be.”

— Henry Kissinger

73. “Don’t be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.”

— Henry Kissinger

74. “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 Kissinger

75. “Chess teaches the Clausewitzian concepts of “center of gravity” and the “decisive point” – the game usually beginning as a struggle for the center of the board. Wei qi teaches the art of strategic encirclement.”

— Henry Kissinger

76. “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

77. “This is awful. Do it again.”

— Henry Kissinger

78. “When you travel as secretary, one problem you have is that the press comes with you and wants an immediate result because it justifies their trip. And sometimes the best result is that you don’t try to get a result but try to get an understanding for the next time you go to them.”

— Henry Kissinger

79. “Let us fashion together a new world order.”

— Henry Kissinger

80. “Peace depends ultimately not on political arrangements but on the conscience of mankind.”

— Henry Kissinger

81. “I think China will do nothing to obstruct it, and they probably will go along with it.”

— Henry Kissinger

82. “Far too often, the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other – it should function as a bridge between them.”

— Henry Kissinger

83. “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 Kissinger

84. “Obama is like a chess player who is playing simultaneous chess and has opened his game with an unusual opening.”

— Henry Kissinger

85. “Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.”

— Henry Kissinger

86. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

88. “Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.”

— Henry Kissinger

89. “The nuclear weapons were not useful for the achievement of political objectives.”

— Henry Kissinger

90. “I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.”

— Henry Kissinger

91. “Even a paranoid can have enemies.”

— Henry Kissinger

92. “Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool.”

— Henry Kissinger

93. “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

— Henry Kissinger

94. “At any rate, mutually assured destruction was never our policy.”

— Henry Kissinger

95. “Power is the great aphrodisiac.”

— Henry Kissinger

96. “Tutelage is a comfortable relationship for the senior partner, but it is demoralizing in the long run. It breeds illusions of omniscience on one side and attitudes of impotent irresponsibility on the other.”

— Henry Kissinger

97. “You should not think that you can shape history only by your will. This is also why I’m against the concept of intervention when you don’t know its ultimate implications.”

— Henry Kissinger

98. “The Chinese, on the other hand, were in the position of having an American military spy plane on a Chinese military base and they had their own internal problems to deal with. At first, the Chinese weren’t all that belligerent. They were just stalling to get their own bureaucracy in line.”

— Henry Kissinger

99. “I believe it is a mistake to isolate arms control from other areas of policy.”

— Henry Kissinger

100. “Before there was the Soviet Union that could inflame matters. Now you have states not as powerful as the Soviet Union, but states like Iraq, like Iran, and to some extent Syria, having made it possible for some of these groups to operate. So it is a very difficult situation.”

— Henry Kissinger