Top 380 Henry Kissinger Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices?”

— Henry Kissinger

252. “Historically, alliances had been formed to augment a nation’s strength in case of war; as World War I approached, the primary motive for war was to strengthen the alliances.”

— Henry Kissinger

253. “Constantly changing shape as its rulers annexed contiguous territories, Russia was an empire out of scale in comparison with any of the European countries. Moreover, with every new conquest, the character of the state changed as it incorporated another brand-new, restive, non-Russian ethnic group. This was one of the reasons Russia felt obliged to maintain huge armies whose size was unrelated to any plausible threat to its external security.”

— Henry Kissinger

254. “So long as strategic nuclear weapons were the principal element of Europe’s defense, the objective of European policy was primarily psychological: to oblige the United States to treat Europe as an extension of itself in case of an emergency.”

— Henry Kissinger

255. “A basic conflict is thus arising over Europe between the interests of Atlantic sea-power, which demand the preservation of vigorous and independent political life on the European peninsula, and the interests of the jealous Eurasian land power, which must always seek to extend itself to the west and will never find a place, short of the Atlantic Ocean, where it can from its own standpoint safely stop.”

— Henry Kissinger

256. “At least three viewpoints are identifiable in Arab attitudes: a small, dedicated, but not very vocal group accepting genuine coexistence with Israel and prepared to work for it; a much larger group seeking to destroy Israel by permanent confrontation; and those willing to negotiate with Israel but justifying negotiations, at least domestically, in part as a means to overcome the Jewish state in stages.”

— Henry Kissinger

257. “I want to express here my continuing respect and personal affection for President George W. Bush, who guided America with courage, dignity, and conviction in an unsteady time. His objectives and dedication honored his country even when in some cases they proved unattainable within the American political cycle.”

— Henry Kissinger

258. “Under the ayatollahs’ concept of policy, the dispute with the West is not a matter of specific technical concessions or negotiating formulas but a contest over the nature of world order.”

— Henry Kissinger

259. “Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The.”

— Henry Kissinger

260. “The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily.”

— Henry Kissinger

261. “The two sides need to absorb the history of the decade before World War I, when the gradual emergence of an atmosphere of suspicion and latent confrontation escalated into catastrophe. The leaders of Europe trapped themselves by their military planning and inability to separate the tactical from the strategic.”

— Henry Kissinger

262. “The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.”

— Henry Kissinger

263. “In a nuclear war, even if one side were to come out ahead by systems analytical standards, both sides would be so weakened, that it would – they would be in the position of Europe after the two World Wars.”

— Henry Kissinger

264. “What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.”

— Henry Kissinger

265. “We are all the President’s men.”

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

277. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

279. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

281. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

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

— Henry Kissinger

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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