Top 99 Kissinger Quotes & Sayings

What Americans can't face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.

My dad wasn't the best speaker like a Bill Clinton, or a Henry Kissinger, but he had character.

The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger's move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person.

I always thought Henry Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and you can't have that in public life.

He's evil. I believe in redemption, but I haven't seen any redeeming qualities in Henry Kissinger.

Vietnam ended a failure: repeatedly, to me, Kissinger described it as his greatest, and most persistent regret. But Congress was more to blame than Kissinger.

Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public - not while he was alive, at any rate.

On April 14, 1986, when the Reagan administration launched an airstrike on Libya in clear violation of international law, Kissinger did the rounds on news shows to justify the bombing. The day after the bombing, Kissinger appeared on ABC's 'Good Morning America' to voice his 'total support.' Attacking Libya, he said, was 'correct' and 'necessary.'

I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman.

Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford - but you'll take him anyway.

Regardless of some disagreements in the past with Dr. Kissinger, I personally had a very good relationship with the secretary when I served as ambassador to the United States and later on as premier.

A triumph in which Kissinger could claim to have played some little part, in the presidential elections that November, President Richard Nixon had won the second greatest landslide in American history. Forty-seven million Americans had voted for him - and for his and Kissinger's policies - representing more than 60 percent of all the votes cast.

Keeping his face clean over Watergate was one of Kissinger's biggest successes; so was his overall handling of the Yom Kippur War.

Madeleine Albright introduced herself to me. I talked to Henry Kissinger and Barbara Walters. And I asked Peter Jennings to write a note of encouragement to my son, Logan, a news anchor at the ABC affiliate in Palm Springs.

Kissinger celebrants inevitably point to two things to justify their admiration: an opening to China - 'rapprochement' - and improved relations with the Soviet Union - detente - which included SALT, a historic arms-limitation treaty.

Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there.

Endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980, Kissinger threw in with America's new militarists, who would jump-start a revived Cold War and drive to retake the Third World.

Vice-President Ford, possibly preparing for higher duties, assessed Kissinger's part in the Syrian-Israeli troop disengagement as "the great diplomatic triumph of this century or perhaps any other.

My father left Nazi Germany a year after Dr. Kissinger, and so in my household he was very much an icon. He was a kind of immigrant success story, a refugee success story.

Dr. Kissinger was surprised that I knew where Ghana was.

I think Hadley is to Rice as Scowcroft was to Kissinger; not inclined to think or act independently.

The propaganda system allows the U.S. Ieadership to commit crimes without limit and with no suggestion of misbehavior or criminality; in fact, major war criminals like Henry Kissinger appear regularly on TV to comment on the crimes of the derivative butchers.

Most students of Kissinger find it hard to say anything about Kissinger that isn't about the man himself. He is such an outsize figure that he eclipses his own context, leading his many biographers, critics, and admirers to focus nearly exclusively on the quirks of his personality or his moral failings.

Kissinger's monopoly on this historical record has driven many scholars to distraction. Groups of lawyers, scholars, journalists and archivists have used pronunciamento, lawsuit, and other crowbars in a usually vain effort to open Kissinger's Library of Congress cache.

Christmas 1972 was a lonely time for Kissinger, as well as for his boss, and a period of serious reflection. Kissinger was then a bachelor, enamored of the tall, elegant, but elusive WASP Nancy Maginnes, but still very much a bachelor - Washington's most sought-after bachelor.

Kissinger's unusually high body count and singular moral imperiousness has the effect, among his critics, of obscuring his didactic utility. An outsized personality who has committed outsized mayhem, Kissinger eclipses his own context. Yet, as animals were to the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Kissinger is good to think with.

Pride comes before a fall - although in [Henry Kissinger's] case it's more conceit than pride.

I am not now, and never have been, a girlfriend of Henry Kissinger.

What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed.

In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists.

Henry Kissinger is perhaps the best-known American statesman of the 20th century.

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.

Nixon's deep antipathy toward Jews is well known, and he took a strange satisfaction in having Kissinger in his inner circle, where he could periodically taunt him.

The neocons are supporting Hillary [Clinton] just like the neoliberals are. She's seeking the endorsement of Henry Kissinger as well.

Flattery was one of Kissinger's principal tools in winning over Nixon, and a tool he employed shamelessly.

Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today, with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars.

Various people have explained why Henry Kissinger is a bad choice to run an investigation into what went wrong on Sept. 11. He's a liar. He's an apologist for corrupt regimes.

What Americans cant face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.

The important point was that whatever errors America had made [in Vietnam] "we are so powerful [according to Secretary Kissinger] that Hanoi is simply unable to defeat us militarily" and must therefore eventually be forced to compromise.

I don't think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.

Henry Kissinger spent years negotiating the terms of our surrender there and ended up with a deal that he could have gotten on the first day he went to work in the Nixon White House - the Americans leave and North Vietnam wins.

There's a great quote from Henry Kissinger, which I became aware of from reading [Joseph] Heller's Good As Gold. He said: 'Every great achievement was a dream before it became a reality.'

Henry Kissinger is possessed of a truly superior intelligence, in addition to which he has two qualities which, unfortunately, many great men lack: he is able to listen and he has a very subtle sense of humour.

Charlie Rangel is angry about the Iraq war, the one that Henry Kissinger has told us we can't win. Thanks, Henry, but most Americans figured that out before you did. Rangel saw combat in Korea. Kissinger has only seen combat on TV. That might have something to do with why Kissinger thinks our troops should stay in Iraq even though we can't win.

Kissinger's major, and most lucrative role, has come as head of Kissinger Associates in New York City, founded on a loan obtained in 1982 from the international banking firm of E.M. Warburg, Pincus and Company. Nominally, Kissinger Associates (KA) is an "international consulting firm" but "consultant" covers many sins, and in KA's case, this means international political influence-peddling for its two dozen or so important corporate clients.

Nixon at one point informs Kissinger . . . that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves . . . genocide.

Hillary Clinton's progress as a public figure and politician can, in fact, be indexed perfectly by her relationship to Henry Kissinger.

Henry Kissinger appeared on Dynasty. Have you had any celebrities outside of the film or acting realm that have said, "You know, I'd love to do a bit part or something," a sports star or a politician or?

I know what kind of books I read on vacation, and it is not necessarily 'Diplomacy' by Henry Kissinger. No disrespect to that book; I have read that book. But not on spring break.

I'm not who people expect me to be. I'm not Henry Kissinger.

Republican secretaries of state from Kissinger to Baker, Powell to Rice, President Bush, 71 United States Senators all supported President Obama's new START treaty, but not Mitt Romney.

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

In Haig's presence, Kissinger referred pointedly to military men as "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy.

I wanted to look at how people deal with death. Why is Henry Kissinger not in jail and Charles Manson is?

The Donald Trump call in the president of Taiwan and of itself, as Henry Kissinger said, hasn't created some tremendous trouble in China. But what we don't know is whether this is just posturing or whether this is a policy change.

I think Haig will be foolish, but perhaps not quite as foolish as Kissinger was, because Haig doesn't have the education Kissinger had. Haig is a little more dangerous because, I fear, he believes what he says, whereas I never got that impression from Kissinger.

Since leaving office in 1977, Dr. Kissinger has continued to play a highly influential role in U.S. politics, in the U.S. media, and in the Rockefeller world empire. It was Kissinger, along with David Rockefeller, who was decisive in the disastrous decision of President Carter to admit the recently toppled Shah of Iran, old friend and ally of the Rockefellers into the United States, a decision that led directly to the Iranian hostage crisis and to Carter's downfall.

People say: But photographs are all lies. That's not the point. The lie is a truth, too. How the hell are we going to know what Kissinger looks like? Well, the photograph tells us one version; I'm trying to tell it also, but differently.

Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.

Nixon did not anticipate the extent to which Kissinger, whom he barely knew when he appointed him national-security adviser in 1969, would be envious and high-strung - a maintenance project of the first order.