Henry Kissinger Quotes
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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. “When statesmen want to gain time, they offer to talk.”

— Henry Kissinger

103. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

105. “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

106. “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

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

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

— Henry Kissinger

110. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

118. “We are doomed to coexist.”

— Henry Kissinger

119. “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

120. “Power is the great aphrodisiac.”

— Henry Kissinger

121. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

123. “A return to the 1967 lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

126. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

131. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

133. “In a nuclear war, even if one side were to come out ahead by systems analytical standards, both sides would be so weakened, that it would – they would be in the position of Europe after the two World Wars.”

— Henry Kissinger

134. “The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.”

— Henry Kissinger

135. “We are all the President’s men.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

137. “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

138. “With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears.”

— Henry Kissinger

139. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

141. “I have always expressed respect for those people who make public declarations.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

143. “What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.”

— Henry Kissinger

144. “I believe in freedom of expression, and I believe that societies thrive when they permit freedom of expression.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

146. “Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

149. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger