Top 380 Henry Kissinger Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “It is frankly a mistake of amateurs to believe you can gain the upper hand in a diplomatic negotiation.”

— Henry Kissinger

102. “America has made it very clear in several administrations that if there is an attack by China on Taiwan, the United States is very likely to resist.”

— Henry Kissinger

103. “Our nation is uniquely endowed to play a creative and decisive role in the new order which is taking form around us.”

— Henry Kissinger

104. “Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered...”

— Henry Kissinger

105. “Realism in foreign policy means careful consideration of all aspects pertinent to the issue, before taking a decision. This is the only way you can move from where you are to someplace else.”

— Henry Kissinger

106. “Withdrawal of US troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public: The more US troops come home, the more will be demanded.”

— Henry Kissinger

107. “The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat.”

— Henry Kissinger

108. “Taiwan will probably not declare independence. The question isn’t independence. The issue is whether Taiwan will declare itself as a sovereign separate state. That will start a huge crisis if that happens.”

— Henry Kissinger

109. “Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.”

— Henry Kissinger

110. “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

111. “The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.”

— Henry Kissinger

112. “The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

114. “People think responsibility is hard to bear. It’s not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.”

— Henry Kissinger

115. “Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union.”

— Henry Kissinger

116. “Because complexity inhibits flexibility, early choices are especially crucial.”

— Henry Kissinger

117. “The defining issue is that the government in Taiwan was considered to be the government of all of China, and the authorities in Beijing were not recognized as a government of China. So Taiwan was the residuary for all of China.”

— Henry Kissinger

118. “It is steady, reliable, tough. It never yields to panic. It is never defeated one-sidedly. It achieves everything attainable by character and tenacity.”

— Henry Kissinger

119. “The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.”

— Henry Kissinger

120. “I have learned, as I wrote, that history must be discovered, not declared. It’s an admission that one grows in life.”

— Henry Kissinger

121. “When statesmen want to gain time, they offer to talk.”

— Henry Kissinger

122. “Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.”

— Henry Kissinger

123. “Certainly not a party of the workers and the peasants. In fact, Jiang Zemin in recent weeks has officially said that capitalists and the entrepreneurs should be enrolled in the Communist Party.”

— Henry Kissinger

124. “If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint.”

— Henry Kissinger

125. “Donald Rumsfeld is the most ruthless man I have ever met? and I mean that as a compliment.”

— Henry Kissinger

126. “Baseball is the most intellectual game because most of the action goes on in your head.”

— Henry Kissinger

127. “Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

129. “It has the added advantage of being true.”

— Henry Kissinger

130. “We believe that peace is at hand.”

— Henry Kissinger

131. “Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.”

— Henry Kissinger

132. “The history of things that didn’t happen has never been written.”

— Henry Kissinger

133. “Woe to the statesman whose arguments for entering a war are not as convincing at its end as they were at the beginning,” Bismarck had cautioned.”

— Henry Kissinger

134. “Statesman create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator.”

— Henry Kissinger

135. “The Israelis want security. The Arabs want dignity. And they consider the demands of each other as incompatible.”

— Henry Kissinger

136. “To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires character and courage: character because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first. And the statesman must then inspire his people to persist in the endeavor.”

— Henry Kissinger

137. “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

138. “I don’t consider China a communist state, no. I know that sounds paradoxical, but it’s my view.”

— Henry Kissinger

139. “The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive.”

— Henry Kissinger

140. “We are doomed to coexist.”

— Henry Kissinger

141. “History knows no resting places and no plateaus.”

— Henry Kissinger

142. “The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

144. “I do not criticize people who take a public stand on human rights issues. I express my respect for them. But some people are more influential without a public confrontation.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

146. “No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.”

— Henry Kissinger

147. “American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.”

— Henry Kissinger

148. “I see the future of China as growth. I think that historically China has often gone through periods of consolidation, and then periods of sort of weakening central authority. They undoubtedly face tremendous challenges.”

— Henry Kissinger

149. “The statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between his nation’s experience and his vision.”

— Henry Kissinger

150. “It is always easy to divide the world into idealists and power-oriented people. The idealists are presumed to be the noble people, and the power-oriented people are the ones that cause all the world’s trouble.”

— Henry Kissinger