Henry Kissinger Quotes

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction.

I have spoken to Chinese leaders occasionally on human rights, but I’ve always done it in private.

I don’t see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.

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.

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.

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.

I have not endorsed Trump and will not do so.

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

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

I think that America’s recovery of a global strategic view is an absolutely essential element of our foreign policy.

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.

My view of my role is that together with like-minded men and women, I could help contribute to a bipartisan view of American engagement in the world for another period; I could do my part to overcome this really, in a way, awful period in which we are turning history into personal recriminations, depriving our political system of a serious debate.

There has come into being a kind of a Shia belt from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut. And this gives Iran the opportunity to reconstruct the ancient Persian Empire – this time under the Shia label.

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.

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.

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

Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came in to office.

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it’s very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they’re doing.

America has fought five wars since 1945 and has gained its objectives in only one of them, the Gulf War.

The statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between his nation’s experience and his vision.

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

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

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

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

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

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

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

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

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.

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

I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

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.

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

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

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

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

We are all the President’s men.

The Trump phenomenon is in large part a reaction of Middle America to attacks on its values by intellectual and academic communities. There are other reasons, but this is a significant one.

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

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

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

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

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

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

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

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.

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.

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

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

Every first-term president has to learn something after he comes into office. Nobody can be completely ready for the inevitable crises.

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.

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