Words matter. These are the best Henry Kissinger Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I think when the president of the United States calls for military action, he should do it for a united people, especially when the methods have been so cruel, so explicitly directed at Americans.
If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.
The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn’t make it.
Power is the great aphrodisiac.
The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples.
Even a paranoid can have enemies.
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets.
It’s never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn’t know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.
You can’t make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria.
Every first-term president has to learn something after he comes into office. Nobody can be completely ready for the inevitable crises.
Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.
If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.
I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.
The attitude of the West and of Russia towards a crisis like Ukraine is diametrically different. The West is trying to establish the legality of any established border. For Russia, Ukraine is part of the Russian patrimony.
High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.
The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
The statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between his nation’s experience and his vision.
Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction.
The high probability is if American forces withdraw from Afghanistan and if no alternative international arrangement is made that then the historic contests between the regions and the sects will reappear, the Taliban will re-emerge, and a very complicated and maybe chaotic situation will develop.
For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.
No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.
People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.
A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
America has fought five wars since 1945 and has gained its objectives in only one of them, the Gulf War.
Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.
We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.
The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.
I think that America’s recovery of a global strategic view is an absolutely essential element of our foreign policy.
Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.
Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
The Vietnam War was a great tragedy for our country. And it is now far enough away so that one can study without using the slogans to see what’s really happened.
Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
No foreign policy – no matter how ingenious – has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.
The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.
Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.
Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.
I think we would find, if you study the conduct of guerilla-type wars, that the Obama Administration has hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon Administration ever did.
