Top 380 Henry Kissinger Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Observe carefully; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.40.”

— Henry Kissinger

352. “Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies.”

— Henry Kissinger

353. “The nature of these challenges was not singular to the 1930s. 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. The interwar years’ toxic mixture of facile pacifism, geopolitical imbalance, and allied disunity allowed these forces a free hand.”

— Henry Kissinger

354. “No leader among Russia’s immediate neighbors shares America’s faith in Russian conversion as the key to his country’s security.”

— Henry Kissinger

355. “Roosevelt returned to this theme in his fourth inaugural address in 1945: We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust or with fear.”

— Henry Kissinger

356. “Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. they may deviate from the previous trajectory only within a finite margin. the great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. if they fall short, society stagnates. if they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity.”

— Henry Kissinger

357. “Viewed through the lens of deterrence, seeming weakness could have the same consequences as an actual deficiency;.”

— Henry Kissinger

358. “What degree of inferiority would remain meaningful in a crisis in which each side used its capabilities to the fullest?”

— Henry Kissinger

359. “It entered into a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with North Korea in 1961, containing a clause on mutual defense against outside attack that is still in force at this writing. But that was more in the nature of the tributary relationship familiar from Chinese history: Beijing offered protection; North Korean reciprocity was irrelevant to the relationship. The Soviet alliance frayed from the very outset largely because Mao would not accept even the hint of subordination.”

— Henry Kissinger

360. “The study of history offers no manual of instructions that can be applied automatically; history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable situations.”

— Henry Kissinger

361. “The ability to enable people to gather in a square differs from building new institutions of state.”

— Henry Kissinger

362. “Good character does not assure worldly success, or triumph in statecraft, but it does provide firm grounding in victory and consolation in failure.”

— Henry Kissinger

363. “Holy war occasionally moves the already powerful to even greater efforts; it is doomed, however, whenever it flouts strategic or political realities. And the impetus of the age was national identity and national interests, not global jihad.”

— Henry Kissinger

364. “At the end of my November 1973 visit, I suggested to Zhou a hotline between Washington and Beijing as part of an agreement on reducing the risks of accidental war.”

— Henry Kissinger

365. “Rather than clear outcomes, however, we are more likely to arrive at a series of dilemmas with imperfect answers.”

— Henry Kissinger

366. “New methods of accessing and communicating information unite regions as never before and project events globally – but in a manner that inhibits reflection, demanding of leaders that they register instantaneous reactions in a form expressible in slogans. Are we facing a period in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future?”

— Henry Kissinger

367. “As “the East,” it has never been clearly parallel to “the West.” There has been no common religion, not even one splintered into different branches as is Christianity in the West. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity all thrive in different parts of Asia.”

— Henry Kissinger

368. “A great president must be an educator, bridging the gap between his people’s future and its experience.”

— Henry Kissinger

369. “We shouldn’t be afraid of atomic bombs and missiles. No matter what kind of war breaks out – conventional or thermonuclear – we’ll win. As for China, if the imperialists unleash war on us, we may lose more than three hundred million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.27.”

— Henry Kissinger

370. “When information is contextualized, it becomes knowledge. When knowledge compels convictions, it becomes wisdom. Yet the internet inundates users with the opinions of thousands, even millions, of other users, depriving them of the solitude required for sustained reflection that, historically, has led to the development of convictions.”

— Henry Kissinger

371. “The governments on both sides remained committed to the need for cooperation, but they could not control all the ways the countries impinged on each other. It is the unsolved challenge of Chinese-American relations.”

— Henry Kissinger

372. “Almost as if according to some natural law, in every century there seems to emerge a country with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to shape the entire international system in accordance with its own values.”

— Henry Kissinger

373. “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

374. “Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future.”

— Henry Kissinger

375. “For one thousand years, the peoples of Europe had taken for granted that whatever the fluctuations in the balance of power, its constituent elements resided in Europe. The world of the emerging Cold War sought its balances in the conduct and armament of two superpowers: the United States across the Atlantic and the Soviet Union at the geographic fringes of Europe.”

— Henry Kissinger

376. “Relations between China and the United States need not – and should not – become a zero-sum game... Key issues on the international front are global in nature. Consensus may prove difficult, but confronation on these issues is self-defeating.”

— Henry Kissinger

377. “AI’s brittleness is a reflection of the shallowness of what it learns.”

— Henry Kissinger

378. “The pursuit of transparency and connectivity in all aspects of existence, by destroying privacy, inhibits the development of personalities with the strength to take lonely decisions.”

— Henry Kissinger

379. “China as the present-day economic superpower is the legacy of Deng Xiaoping.”

— Henry Kissinger

380. “American approach to policy is pragmatic; China’s is conceptual. America has never had a powerful threatening neighbor; China has never been without a powerful adversary on its borders. Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems. Americans seek an outcome responding to immediate circumstances; Chinese concentrate on evolutionary change.”

— Henry Kissinger

381. “With data and computing requirements limiting the development of more advanced AI, devising training methods that use less data and less computer power is a critical frontier.”

— Henry Kissinger

382. “World order cannot be achieved by any one country acting alone. To achieve a genuine world order, its components, while maintaining their own values, need to acquire a second culture that is global, structural, and juridical – a concept of order that transcends the perspective and ideals of any one region or nation.”

— Henry Kissinger

383. “Mao thought he was inscrutable you know. At least I think he did. it was hard to tell with him.”

— Henry Kissinger

384. “AI can also be used defensively, locating and repairing flaws before they are exploited. But since the attacker can choose the target, AI gives the party on offense an inherent if not insuperable advantage.”

— Henry Kissinger

385. “Later I learned to improve my forecasting – if necessary by asking the visitor in advance what subjects he intended to raise with Nixon. In.”

— Henry Kissinger

386. “In other words, each side could arm itself with whatever ideological slogans fulfilled its own domestic necessities, so long as it did not let them interfere with the need for cooperation against the Soviet danger. Ideology would be relegated to domestic management; it took a leave from foreign policy. The ideological armistice was, of course, valid only so long as objectives remained compatible.”

— Henry Kissinger

387. “Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet.”

— Henry Kissinger

388. “To understand a man,’ Napoleon is said to have observed, ‘look at the world when he was twenty.’ Thatcher had turned twenty in 1945.”

— Henry Kissinger