Top 380 Henry Kissinger Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “We are all the President’s men.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

155. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

160. “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

161. “The Soviet Union would never be bound by agreements, Deng warned; it understood only the language of countervailing force.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

166. “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.”

— Henry Kissinger

167. “Jews were segregated from 1933 on. We could only play against other Jewish teams. This wasn’t just social segregation; this was the beginning of the extermination of the Jews. That’s why my family left Germany in 1938.”

— Henry Kissinger

168. “The position is that stability and peace in Asia depend on a cooperative relationship between China and the United States.”

— Henry Kissinger

169. “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

170. “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 Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

172. “We attempted to try to solve every problem in the world, out of a sense of moral obligations, and attitudes, and our history. But no country can solve every problem without exhausting itself. Therefore, we have to establish priorities.”

— Henry Kissinger

173. “Clearly security without values is like a ship without a rudder. But values without security are like a rudder without a ship.”

— Henry Kissinger

174. “But Japan drew from the challenge the opposite conclusion as China: it threw open its doors to foreign technology and overhauled its institutions in an attempt to replicate the Western powers’ rise.”

— Henry Kissinger

175. “One theory is that we will make war look so attractive that we undermine the deterrent. That’s Never Never Land. What we have now would have been enough to deter Hitler. But we are talking in a different order of reality.”

— Henry Kissinger

176. “To have the United States suddenly come up with a peace proposal after a whole series of terrorist attacks is going to show to the world that this sort of method is something that western societies can’t stand.”

— Henry Kissinger

177. “In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.”

— Henry Kissinger

178. “I have great respect for the Taiwanese. They have done an extraordinary job. But it was not a sustainable position to say that the legitimate government of China resides in Taiwan, which at that time didn’t have much contact with the mainland.”

— Henry Kissinger

179. “The bargaining position of the victor always diminishes with time. Whatever is not exacted during the shock of defeat becomes increasingly difficult to attain later.”

— Henry Kissinger

180. “President Nixon in his inaugural address indicated that he wanted an era of negotiation. Our reasoning was that whatever our ideological differences, whatever our geopolitical differences, we were condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons.”

— Henry Kissinger

181. “For the Soul of France is masterful history, brilliantly researched, and hard to put down.”

— Henry Kissinger

182. “The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.”

— Henry Kissinger

183. “The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.”

— Henry Kissinger

184. “Over time even two armed blind men in a room can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.”

— Henry Kissinger

185. “I want to thank you for stopping the applause. It is impossible for me to look humble for any period of time.”

— Henry Kissinger

186. “Almost all empires were created by force, but none can be sustained by it. Universal rule, to last, needs to translate force into obligation. Otherwise, the energies of the rulers will be exhausted in maintaining their dominance at the expense of their ability to shape the future, which is the ultimate task of statesmanship. Empires persist if repression gives way to consensus.”

— Henry Kissinger

187. “A nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions.”

— Henry Kissinger

188. “One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if applied correctly to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old problems of violent conflict. Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted in the Internet age, this theory posits, because “people who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners.”

— Henry Kissinger

189. “In any of these evolutions, India will be a fulcrum of twenty-first-century order: an indispensable element, based on its geography, resources, and tradition of sophisticated leadership, in the strategic and ideological evolution of the regions and the concepts of order at whose intersection it stands.”

— Henry Kissinger

190. “For the greatest part of humanity and the longest periods of history, empire has been the typical mode of government.”

— Henry Kissinger

191. “John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.”

— Henry Kissinger

192. “The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.”

— Henry Kissinger

193. “Realism in foreign policy is made up of a clear set of values, since difficult foreign policy decisions are often decided with the narrowest of majorities. Without any sense of what is right and wrong, one would drown in a flood of difficult and pragmatic decisions.”

— Henry Kissinger

194. “Administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.”

— Henry Kissinger

195. “We have three things in common: Irish wives, the ability to speak for 17 minutes without a verb, and the fact that we both speak with an accent.”

— Henry Kissinger

196. “Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.”

— Henry Kissinger

197. “For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.”

— Henry Kissinger

198. “Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.”

— Henry Kissinger

199. “I go out with actresses because I’m not apt to marry one.”

— Henry Kissinger

200. “We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”

— Henry Kissinger