Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

» The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.

» The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

» There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

» Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

» University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

» No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.

» No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

» 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.

» 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 statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.

» The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

» If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation - and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.

» You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.

» Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

» It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

» 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.

» Next week there can't be any crisis. My schedule is already full.

» The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

» Even a paranoid has some real enemies.

» Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.

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

» Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.

» Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

» To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

» The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

» Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

» The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

» Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.

» 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.

» Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

» 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.

» For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

» The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

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

» If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.

» Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.

» Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

» The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

» We are all the President's men.

» If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

» In crises the most daring course is often safest.

» People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any form that would require me to stop talking for three hours.

» Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

» I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

» While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

» A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.

» Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

» A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.

» Power is the great aphrodisiac.

» Even a paranoid can have enemies.

» There can't be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

» The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples.

» Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

» The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.

» The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

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Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

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