Top 281 Quotes & Sayings by Henry A. Kissinger - Page 2

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.

To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall--that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.

You should not go to war for the privilege of withdrawal. You need to define your objective and the outcome, and it cannot be the removal of one man.

90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad name.

History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.

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

If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.

I grew up in Germany during the Nazi period, and I came to this country when I was 15. And then I had to work in a factory because we had no resources. And I went to night school. So, it was not a rational ambition for me to become a world statesman.

John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.

Every time there has been an attempt to disturb it, it led to two things. It led to immediate intense conflict with China, and it led to a reaffirmation in the end, because nobody wanted a major confrontation with China to this principle of a "one China" policy within which Taiwan is finding a place now. Its own position has greatly improved since the Nixon policy. It is richer, it is stronger and it is participating in many international organizations.

Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states.

I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.

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.

Over time even two armed blind men in a room can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.

In a diplomatic negotiation, you always meet the same the other side all the time. Even if you should succeed in outsmarting him or in pressuring him, it only sets up a cycle in which he will try to get even.

Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.

It is frankly a mistake of amateurs to believe you can gain the upper hand in a diplomatic negotiation.

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

People think responsibility is hard to bear. It's not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.

I believe it is a mistake to isolate arms control from other areas of policy.

In the current [Carter] administration, who can use the White House swimming pool and tennis courts is decided at the very highest level. President Ford did not bother himself with such minor details. He let me swim in the pool. He only got upset when I tried to walk across the water.

You become a superpower by being strong but also by being wise and by being farsighted. But no state is strong or wise enough to create a world order alone.

There are some people who think that at some time in the future, China may challenge us for supremacy in the Pacific, and therefore, what do we do today to prevent that? And you, of course, will say that we will try to thwart any economic progress in China. If we engaged in such a policy, we would turn a billion-plus people into nationalist opponents of the United States.

I am against portraying China as the demon of the global community. China has grasped more quickly than other countries what globalization means and what it demands. The country has learned how to use other people's innovations for itself. India, incidentally, is not far behind China in this respect. Both are not nations in the European sense, but rather cultural communities with enormous markets. The challenge of the future is to work out how to deal with that.

Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.

The history of things that didn't happen has never been written.

The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.

We cannot give Russia veto over deployment of forces on NATO territory. But we have to understand their particular sensitivities, and, therefore, there should be a dialogue on these issues.

I want to thank you for stopping the applause. It is impossible for me to look humble for any period of time.

It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.

Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.

I grew up as a discriminated minority in a dictatorship, so obviously the issue of human rights is a matter of concern for me.

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.

A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.

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

The British capitalize on their accent when they don't want you to know what they're saying. But if you wake them up at 4 A.M., they speak perfect English, the same as we do.

The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.

We're at a moment when the international system is in a period of change like we haven't seen for several hundred years. In some parts of the world, the nation state, on which the existing international system was based, is either giving up its traditional aspects, like in Europe, or as in the Middle East, where it was never really fully established, it is no longer the defining element. So in those two parts of the world, there is tremendous adjustment in traditional concepts.

The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.

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. A Russian state was created around Kiev about 1,200 years ago. Ukraine itself has been part of Russia for 500 years, and I would say most Russians consider it part of Russian patrimony. The ideal solution would be to have a Ukraine like Finland or Austria that can be a bridge between these two rather than an outpost.

One of the hardest things for the president is to distinguish the routine issues that come through from the essential issues that affect the long term, and not to let himself get sucked into the battles of the bureaucracy for marginal issues, and to keep them focused and to keep his mind clear on what the fundamental things are that he has to accomplish.

If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.

The Israelis want security. The Arabs want dignity. And they consider the demands of each other as incompatible.

Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.

Does anyone have any questions for my answers?

Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.

Create the impression of endless willingness to compromise and you almost invite deadlines. That's the challenge we now have in North Korea and have had in North Korea for 10 years. In this sense, diplomacy and foreign policy and other elements of political activity have to be closely linked and have to be understood by the negotiators

Almost every peace process that has gone on between the Arab side and Israel, the United States has been somewhat isolated because most of the countries in the world, what they really want is to accept the Arab peace plan or so-called peace plan, which in its present form would lead to the destruction of Israel.

Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.

This is awful. Do it again.

The Chinese military budget today is officially listed as, I think, about $15 billion. But even if you double it, that's only a tenth of ours. So the possibility of China challenging the United States for the next ten years over the Pacific is next to zero. There could be a conflict between us and China over Taiwan, but I think that, too, will not occur with the proper policies on both sides.

University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.

The nuclear weapons were not useful for the achievement of political objectives.

Statesman create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator.

I've often said that the desire to lecture China on how it should behave in the world is wrong. China was around for thousands of years even before America existed. It could even be that China's growing power will allow itself to be slowed down. But as long as this immense empire doesn't fall apart, it will become an important factor in global politics.

Where position is felt to be a birthright, generosity is possible (though not guaranteed); flexibility is not inhibited by a commitment to perpetual success.

The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.

There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane: Either you have diarrhea, or you're anxious to meet people who do.