Top 380 Henry Kissinger Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 8

101. “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

102. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

106. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

117. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

120. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

122. “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

123. “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

124. “We are doomed to coexist.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

130. “What distinguishes Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military.”

— Henry Kissinger

131. “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

132. “Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation – at least in the foreign policy world – depend on context and relevance.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

134. “I don’t have a brief for every single reaction of Israel, but I think it is important that the political negotiations occur free of the threat of terrorism.”

— Henry Kissinger

135. “Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.”

— Henry Kissinger

136. “At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, ‘... what would we gain by helping the french destroy Germany?’ he replied: ‘what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be’.”

— Henry Kissinger

137. “Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just – not only by leaders, but also by citizens. It must reflect two truths: order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent.”

— Henry Kissinger

138. “The Marshall Plan and NATO succeeded because a political tradition of government remained in Europe, even if impaired.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

142. “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

143. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

145. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

147. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger