Top 380 Henry Kissinger Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The Soviet Union would never be bound by agreements, Deng warned; it understood only the language of countervailing force.”

— Henry Kissinger

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

156. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

164. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

184. “Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.”

— Henry Kissinger

185. “The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.”

— Henry Kissinger

186. “The American formal position has been that we oppose violence by governments against their people. That principle should not be abandoned.”

— Henry Kissinger

187. “You should not go to war for the privilege of withdrawal. You need to define your objective and the outcome, and it cannot be the removal of one man.”

— Henry Kissinger

188. “The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.”

— Henry Kissinger

189. “George Bernard Shaw: “There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.”

— Henry Kissinger

190. “Our greatest foreign policy problem is our divisions at home. Our greatest foreign policy need is national cohesion and a return to the awareness that in foreign policy we are all engaged in a common national endeavor.”

— Henry Kissinger

191. “History is the memory of States.”

— Henry Kissinger

192. “Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy.”

— Henry Kissinger

193. “One has to remember that every progress that has been made towards peace in the Middle East has come under American leadership.”

— Henry Kissinger

194. “When I became security advisor, I became familiar with the so-called SIOP war plans, I called in Secretary McNamara and asked him what they were hiding from me, because I couldn’t believe that the National policy would foresee such a level of destructiveness.”

— Henry Kissinger

195. “Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.”

— Henry Kissinger

196. “The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.”

— Henry Kissinger

197. “The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.”

— Henry Kissinger

198. “I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power.”

— Henry Kissinger

199. “Diplomats operate through deadlock, which is the way by which two sides can test each other’s determination. Even if they have egos for it few heads of government have the time to resolve stalemates, their meetings are too short and the demands of protocol too heavy.”

— Henry Kissinger

200. “Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.”

— Henry Kissinger