Top 380 Henry Kissinger Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.”

— Henry Kissinger

202. “Now when I bore people at a party they think it’s their fault.”

— Henry Kissinger

203. “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

204. “The key decision for a statesman is whether to commit his nation or not. There is no middle course. Once a great nation commits itself, it must prevail. It will acquire no kudos for translating its inner doubts into hesitation.”

— Henry Kissinger

205. “The first reactions are often instinctive. So one of the first things we said was that the Chinese had no right to inspect the plane, and that we had a sovereign right to. I don’t know what the legal position is, but it was surely psychologically absolutely the unwise thing to do.”

— Henry Kissinger

206. “The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.”

— Henry Kissinger

207. “It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

209. “A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck’s nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: “We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

211. “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

212. “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

213. “Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.”

— Henry Kissinger

214. “History is the memory of States.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

218. “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

219. “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

220. “If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.”

— Henry Kissinger

221. “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

222. “I also do not believe that the United States can let itself be driven into a political role by escalating terrorism, and therefore, the leaders of the Arab world and Arafat should do their utmost to put an end to this and then the United States should do its utmost to produce a political solution.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

225. “In relations with many domestically weak countries, a radio transmitter can be a more effective form of pressure than a squadron B-52s.”

— Henry Kissinger

226. “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

227. “If Chinese exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire, Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it.”

— Henry Kissinger

228. “In the middle ’50s, I had written that the point would come, inevitably, at which the relationship between the cause of conflict and political objectives would be lost.”

— Henry Kissinger

229. “Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity; it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine.”

— Henry Kissinger

230. “Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing.”

— Henry Kissinger

231. “United States would become the indispensable defender of the order Europe designed.”

— Henry Kissinger

232. “In my life, I have almost always been on the side of active foreign policy. But you need to know with whom you are cooperating. You need reliable partners.”

— Henry Kissinger

233. “Americans believe that you can alter people by conversion, and that everybody in the world is a potential American. The Chinese also believe that their values are universal, but they do not believe that you can convert to becoming a Chinese unless you are born into it.”

— Henry Kissinger

234. “In my particular case foreign policy happens to be my hobby, my consuming interest. I had spent decades studying it.”

— Henry Kissinger

235. “If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.”

— Henry Kissinger

236. “We are not just any nation.”

— Henry Kissinger

237. “You know, this is a very strange phenomenon. I keep reading that in American newspapers, and I keep reading extensive speculations. I meet with the Chinese leaders periodically, and while I don’t say they’ve endorsed the missile shield, it has not been in the forefront of their discussions.”

— Henry Kissinger

238. “Certainly nothing is easier than to rewrite history. If we had made Taiwan a separate state, it would have led to a fundamental conflict with China, and probably to war. Certainly in the long term, it would have led to war.”

— Henry Kissinger

239. “The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.”

— Henry Kissinger

240. “I grew up as a discriminated minority in a dictatorship, so obviously the issue of human rights is a matter of concern for me.”

— Henry Kissinger

241. “In the hands of a determined Secretary, the Foreign Service can be a splendid instrument, staffed by knowledgeable, discreet, and energetic individuals. They do require constant vigilance lest the convictions that led them into a penurious career tempt them to preempt decision-making.”

— Henry Kissinger

242. “If the gap between the qualities required for election and those essential for the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and sense of history that should be part of foreign policy may be lost – or else the cultivation of these qualities may take so much of a president’s first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for the United States.”

— Henry Kissinger

243. “I had an opportunity to express my views, yes. I agreed with the approach which we took, namely, to make a distinction between the loss of life of the Chinese pilot and our military operations outside territorial waters or territorial limits.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

245. “Well, on the American side, every new administration has to cut its teeth in a crisis, because before a crisis, you don’t really know what your various subordinates are thinking under stress.”

— Henry Kissinger

246. “I don’t think we should pay people to fight terrorism. I would be amazed if they asked for anything in return.”

— Henry Kissinger

247. “Two different people appealing to a search engine with the same question do not necessarily receive the same answers. The concept of truth is being relativized and individualized – losing its universal character.”

— Henry Kissinger

248. “We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.”

— Henry Kissinger

249. “Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.”

— Henry Kissinger

250. “People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any form that would require me to stop talking for three hours.”

— Henry Kissinger