Top 380 Henry Kissinger Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “In my particular case foreign policy happens to be my hobby, my consuming interest. I had spent decades studying it.”

— Henry Kissinger

202. “We are not just any nation.”

— Henry Kissinger

203. “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

204. “In my view, there’s no doubt that the Soviets had infinitely greater trouble holding their structure together than we did.”

— Henry Kissinger

205. “In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.”

— Henry Kissinger

206. “Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany at the age of seventy-three, an age by which Bismarck’s career was nearing its end.”

— Henry Kissinger

207. “I wouldn’t say it’s a split. It’s a difference of emphasis. It does exist between, I would say, the State Department and the Defense Department.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

209. “Created by humans, AI should be overseen by humans. But in our time, one of AI’s challenges is that the skills and resources required to create it are not inevitably paired with the philosophical perspective to understand its broader implications.”

— Henry Kissinger

210. “I think a resumption of the Cold War would be a historic tragedy. If a conflict is avoidable, on a basis reflecting morality and security, one should try to avoid it.”

— Henry Kissinger

211. “Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.”

— Henry Kissinger

212. “For the balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux.”

— Henry Kissinger

213. “The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of all books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking – the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future.”

— Henry Kissinger

214. “In our period, new technology has been developed, but remains in need of a guiding philosophy.”

— Henry Kissinger

215. “Religion and politics never merged into a single construct, leading to Voltaire’s truthful jest that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.”

— Henry Kissinger

216. “The penalty for excessive ambition – what the Greeks called hubris – is exhaustion, while the price for resting on one’s laurels is progressive insignificance and eventual decay.”

— Henry Kissinger

217. “In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role.”

— Henry Kissinger

218. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

220. “The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power.”

— Henry Kissinger

221. “As nuclear weapons spread into more and more hands, the calculus of deterrence grows increasingly ephemeral and deterrence less and less reliable. In a widely proliferated world, it becomes ever more difficult to decide who is deterring whom and by what calculations.”

— Henry Kissinger

222. “The Art of War articulates a doctrine less of territorial conquest than of psychological dominance; it was the way the North Vietnamese fought America.”

— Henry Kissinger

223. “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

224. “Still, China was not a missionary society in the Western sense of the term. It sought to induce respect, not conversion; that subtle line could never be crossed. Its mission was its performance, which foreign societies were expected to recognize and acknowledge. It was possible for another country to become a friend, even an old friend, but it could never be treated as China’s peer.”

— Henry Kissinger

225. “American exceptionalism is missionary. It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world. China’s exceptionalism is cultural.”

— Henry Kissinger

226. “The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook.”

— Henry Kissinger

227. “The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century’s decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.”

— Henry Kissinger

228. “Because the unchecked eastward advance into Manchuria and Korea of Russia – a country that, in Roosevelt’s words, “pursued a policy of consistent opposition to us in the East, and of literally fathomless mendacity” –.”

— Henry Kissinger

229. “Germany achieved unification as an affirmation of liberal democracy; it reaffirmed its commitment to European unity as a project of common values and shared development.”

— Henry Kissinger

230. “In the vacuum of authority following the demonstrations’ initial success, factions from the pre-uprising period are often in a position to shape the outcome.”

— Henry Kissinger

231. “Hence the task of a strategist is less to analyze a particular situation than to determine its relationship to the context in which it occurs. No particular constellation is ever static; any pattern is temporary and in essence evolving. The strategist must capture the direction of that evolution and make it serve his ends. Sun Tzu uses the word “shi” for that quality, a concept with no direct Western counterpart.”

— Henry Kissinger

232. “You must never forget that the unification of Germany is more important than the development of the European Union, that the fall of the Soviet Union is more important than the unification of Germany, and that the rise of India and China is more important than the fall of the Soviet Union.”

— Henry Kissinger

233. “Because in this view the domestic principles of an Islamic state were divinely ordained, non-Muslim political entities were illegitimate; they could never be accepted by Muslim states as truly equal counterparts. A peaceful world order depended on the ability to forge and expand a unitary Islamic entity, not on an equilibrium of competing parts.”

— Henry Kissinger

234. “The scientist thus learns truth experimentally or mathematically; the strategist reasons at least partly by analogy with the past – first establishing which events are comparable and which prior conclusions remain relevant.”

— Henry Kissinger

235. “China produced no religious themes in the Western sense at all. The Chinese never generated a myth of cosmic creation.”

— Henry Kissinger

236. “Whenever peace – conceived as the avoidance of war – has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community. Whenever the international order has acknowledged that certain principles could not be compromised even for the sake of peace, stability based on an equilibrium of forces was at least conceivable.”

— Henry Kissinger

237. “In the Chinese version of exceptionalism, China did not export its ideas but let others come to seek them.”

— Henry Kissinger

238. “For nearly twenty years, Bismarck preserved the peace and eased international tension with his moderation and flexibility. But he paid the price of misunderstood greatness, for his successors and would-be imitators could draw no better lesson from his example than multiplying arms and waging a war which would cause the suicide of European civilization.”

— Henry Kissinger

239. “The essence of building a constructive world order is that no single country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in the immediate post–Cold War period, when it was materially and psychologically preeminent.”

— Henry Kissinger

240. “What is new about the emerging world order is that, for the first time, the United States can neither withdraw from the world nor dominate it.”

— Henry Kissinger

241. “Where Western strategists reflect on the means to assemble superior power at the decisive point, Sun Tzu addresses the means of building a dominant political and psychological position, such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone conclusion. Western strategists test their maxims by victories in battles; Sun Tzu tests by victories where battles have become unnecessary.”

— Henry Kissinger

242. “Since no grand resolution was available, the Gong memorial established a priority among the dangers, in effect based on the principle of defeating the near barbarians with the assistance of the far barbarians. It was a classical Chinese strategy that would be revisited roughly a hundred years later by Mao.”

— Henry Kissinger

243. “The irony is that even as digitization is making an increasing amount of information available, it is diminishing the space required for deep, concentrated thought.”

— Henry Kissinger

244. “In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it.”

— Henry Kissinger

245. “Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told Ambassador Robert Murphy, a Dulles emissary, that, if Great Britain did not confront Nasser now, “Britain would become another Netherlands.”

— Henry Kissinger

246. “Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems.”

— Henry Kissinger

247. “America must distill a common understanding with a country that is the central eventual prize targeted by both the Sunni and the Shia versions of jihad and whose efforts, however circuitous, will be essential in fostering a constructive regional evolution.”

— Henry Kissinger

248. “Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy.”

— Henry Kissinger

249. “In a world where continental structures like America, China, and maybe India and Brazil have already reached critical mass, how will Europe handle its transition to a regional unit?”

— Henry Kissinger

250. “Torn between obsessive insecurity and proselytizing zeal, between the requirements of Europe and the temptations of Asia, the Russian Empire always had a role in the European equilibrium but was never emotionally a part of it.”

— Henry Kissinger