Top 380 Henry Kissinger Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “This country cannot afford to tear itself apart on a partisan basis on issues so vital to our national security.”

— Henry Kissinger

252. “Any international system must have two key elements for it to work. One, it has to have a certain equilibrium of power that makes overthrowing the system difficult and costly. Secondly, it has to have a sense of legitimacy.”

— Henry Kissinger

253. “Well, the capacity of French intellectuals to understand a Texan way of thinking is finite.”

— Henry Kissinger

254. “To revolutionaries the significant reality is the world which they are fighting to bring about, not the world they are fighting to overcome.”

— Henry Kissinger

255. “A Harvard study has shown that in fifteen cases in history where a rising and an established power interacted, ten ended in war.”

— Henry Kissinger

256. “Will the emerging Europe become an active participant in the construction of a new international order, or will it consume itself on its own internal issues?”

— Henry Kissinger

257. “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

258. “One thing I don’t want around me is a military intellectual. I don’t have to worry about you on that score.”

— Henry Kissinger

259. “Countries do not assume burdens because it is fair, only because it is necessary.”

— Henry Kissinger

260. “What China would do, I cannot predict. China has all but given up the claim to the use of force, except in the circumstance of Taiwan declaring its independence. That is a huge step forward over what the situation was many years ago.”

— Henry Kissinger

261. “Henceforth the adequacy of any military establishment will be tested by its ability to preserve the peace.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

263. “Especially when ultimate decisions of peace and war are involved, a strategist must be aware that bluffs may be called and must take into account the impact on his future credibility of an empty threat.”

— Henry Kissinger

264. “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

265. “I believe that there is a whole set of issues in the world – environment, proliferation, energy, cyberspace – that can only be dealt with on a global basis. The traditional patterns of national rivalry and national competition are not suitable for those cases.”

— Henry Kissinger

266. “Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?”

— Henry Kissinger

267. “Well, he keeps saying that, and as defense secretary, of course he has to think of a lot of potential enemies. I do not think it’s a wise course to articulate this or to base our policy on it. And I do not see under modern circumstances what we would be fighting about.”

— Henry Kissinger

268. “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

269. “Every American president, regardless of party, has said that America has an intense interest in a peaceful resolution. And I think it should be left at that.”

— Henry Kissinger

270. “The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”: Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

— Henry Kissinger

271. “Spanish territory in Florida and Texas – the.”

— Henry Kissinger

272. “Many of the scientists have believed that their contribution to ending the nuclear race is not to let any new weapons to be developed.”

— Henry Kissinger

273. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

279. “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

280. “Moreover, events often move too quickly to allow for precise calculation; leaders have to make judgments based on intuitions and hypotheses that cannot be proven at the time of decision. Management of risk is as critical to the leader as analytical skill.”

— Henry Kissinger

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “The United States has every reason from history and geopolitics to bolster the European Union and prevent its drifting off into a geopolitical vacuum; the United States, if separated from Europe in politics, economics, and defense, would become geopolitically an island off the shores of Eurasia, and Europe itself could turn into an appendage to the reaches of Asia and the Middle East.”

— Henry Kissinger

286. “Its requirement of frequent daily prayers made faith a way of life; its emphasis on the identity of religious and political power transformed the expansion of Islam from an imperial enterprise into a sacred obligation.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

288. “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

289. “When urged to adhere to the international system’s “rules of the game” and “responsibilities,” the visceral reaction of many Chinese – including senior leaders – has been profoundly affected by the awareness that China has not participated in making the rules of the system. They are asked – and, as a matter of prudence, have agreed – to adhere to rules they had had no part in making.”

— Henry Kissinger

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings.”

— Henry Kissinger

297. “World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable to the entire world.”

— Henry Kissinger

298. “Both sides are reinforced in their suspicions by the military maneuvers and defense programs of the other. Even when they are “normal” – that is, composed of measures a country would reasonably take in defense of national interest as it is generally understood – they are interpreted in terms of worst-case scenarios. Each side has a responsibility for taking care lest its unilateral deployments and conduct escalate into an arms race.”

— Henry Kissinger

299. “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

300. “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