Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

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

Certainly not a party of the workers and the peasants. In fact, Jiang Zemin in recent weeks has officially said that capitalists and the entrepreneurs should be enrolled in the Communist Party.

Now when I bore people at a party they think it's their fault.

The elderly are useless eaters.

Obama is like a chess player who is playing simultaneous chess and has opened his game with an unusual opening.

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

The defining issue is that the government in Taiwan was considered to be the government of all of China, and the authorities in Beijing were not recognized as a government of China. So Taiwan was the residuary for all of China.

When I became security advisor, I became familiar with the so-called SIOP war plans, I called in Secretary McNamara and asked him what they were hiding from me, because I couldn't believe that the National policy would foresee such a level of destructiveness.

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

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

The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.

America has made it very clear in several administrations that if there is an attack by China on Taiwan, the United States is very likely to resist.

Tutelage is a comfortable relationship for the senior partner, but it is demoralizing in the long run. It breeds illusions of omniscience on one side and attitudes of impotent irresponsibility on the other.

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.

You should not think that you can shape history only by your will. This is also why I'm against the concept of intervention when you don't know its ultimate implications.

For my generation the relationship with Europe was the central point of American foreign policy. Even during my time in government there was disagreement, sometimes very strong disagreement. But they were all like arguments within a family. I am not sure if the generation which doesn't have these experiences has the same view of things.

A diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure.

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

What China would do, I cannot predict. China has all but given up the claim to the use of force, except in the circumstance of Taiwan declaring its independence. That is a huge step forward over what the situation was many years ago.

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

It is barely conceivable that there are people who like war.

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

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.

For any student of history, change is the law of life. Any attempt to contain it guarantees an explosion down the road; the more rigid the adherence to the status quo, the more violent the ultimate outcome will be.

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

I don't read books, I write them.

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

What is applicable is to understand that first of all China has undergone a huge revolution in the last years. Anyone who saw China as I did in 1971 - and for that matter even in 1979, because not much had changed between 1971 and 1979 - and sees China today, knows one is in a different economic system.

Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered ...

In the short term, it would not have made it possible to resume relations, because in the Chinese mind, the humiliation of China started with the annexation of Taiwan by Japan. If the United States had suddenly declared Taiwan as a separate state - for which we would have had no support among other nations - the consequences would have been giving up our relationship with China and committing ourselves to a long-term conflict with China.

Well, he keeps saying that, and as defense secretary, of course he has to think of a lot of potential enemies. I do not think it's a wise course to articulate this or to base our policy on it. And I do not see under modern circumstances what we would be fighting about.

Let us fashion together a new world order.

Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

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

Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.

Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.

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

[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia . He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.

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

Every success is usually an admission ticket to a new set of decisions.

Far too often, the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side's outpost against the other - it should function as a bridge between them.

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

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

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.

To have the United States suddenly come up with a peace proposal after a whole series of terrorist attacks is going to show to the world that this sort of method is something that western societies can't stand.

Nixon had three goals: to win by the biggest electoral landslide in history; to be remembered as a peacemaker; and to be accepted by the 'Establishment' as an equal. He achieved all these objectives at the end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973. And he lost them all two months later-partly because he turned a dream into an obsession.

Who controls money controls the world.

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

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.

Even paranoid people have enemies.

When you travel as secretary, one problem you have is that the press comes with you and wants an immediate result because it justifies their trip. And sometimes the best result is that you don't try to get a result but try to get an understanding for the next time you go to them.

The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.

I do not criticize people who take a public stand on human rights issues. I express my respect for them. But some people are more influential without a public confrontation.

We have three things in common: Irish wives, the ability to speak for 17 minutes without a verb, and the fact that we both speak with an accent.

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

Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity; it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine.

If you control the food, you control a nation. If you control the energy, you control a region. If you control the money, you control the world.

Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.

Peace depends ultimately not on political arrangements but on the conscience of mankind.

Superstars strive for approbation; heroes walk alone. Superstars crave consensus; heroes define themselves by the judgment of a future they see it as their task to bring about. Superstars seek success in a technique for eliciting support; heroes pursue success as the outgrowth of inner values.

I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power.

There is no realism without an element of idealism.

The one thing man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by a World Government, a New World Order.

The Western concept of democracy is based on the idea that the loser of an election has the possibility next time round of being the winner. But in the case of an ethnically or religiously divided country, in which minorities don't live peacefully together, this necessary balance can't be properly guaranteed by democracy. When each ethnic group arms itself, it is not surprising that the army of a new state is viewed by part of the population as an ideological militia.

President Nixon in his inaugural address indicated that he wanted an era of negotiation. Our reasoning was that whatever our ideological differences, whatever our geopolitical differences, we were condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons.

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

I have always expressed respect for those people who make public declarations.

The Chinese, on the other hand, were in the position of having an American military spy plane on a Chinese military base and they had their own internal problems to deal with. At first, the Chinese weren't all that belligerent. They were just stalling to get their own bureaucracy in line.

Our problem was that in the American approach to Soviet affairs policy has oscillated between people who take an essentially psychological approach and people who take an essentially theological approach, and the two really meet. The psychologists try to "understand" the Soviet Union. And try to ease its alleged fears. The theologians say the Soviets are evil.

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

Every American president, regardless of party, has said that America has an intense interest in a peaceful resolution. And I think it should be left at that.

A nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions.

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

If a Chinese plane landed at Los Angeles Airport having just bought down an American military plane, he wouldn't be permitted to leave the next day. So then we developed a framework which should have been acceptable as a concept to the Chinese, namely to express regret for the loss of life and maintain our position that we had a right to fly these missions.

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.

With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears.

I don't think that that's a desirable option for us. Besides, it wouldn't work, because there are too many other countries that are willing to work economically with China. But I don't think the basic relationship depends on economics. It depends on a political understanding of what is required for peace in Asia.

Statesmen think in terms of history and view society as an organism. Prophets are different since they believe absolute aims can be achieved in the foreseeable future. More people have been killed by crusaders than by statesmen.

Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries

I don't consider China a communist state, no. I know that sounds paradoxical, but it's my view.

We are doomed to coexist.

In the hands of a determined Secretary, the Foreign Service can be a splendid instrument, staffed by knowledgeable, discreet, and energetic individuals. They do require constant vigilance lest the convictions that led them into a penurious career tempt them to preempt decision-making.

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.

What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system

The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.

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.

We believe that peace is at hand.

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

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.

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

Of course, in principle, they're against it. We are the ones that keep asking them what they think about it. I think their basic concern is a land-based missile defense of Taiwan hooked into the American communications and other systems, which in effect would make Taiwan then an outpost of the United States. That is a concern they frequently express. A missile defense shield of the United States, while they may not like it, it is not a big obstacle to our relationship.

NAFTA represents the single most creative step towards a New World Order.

We are not just any nation.

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.

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.

In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.

If the six-nation forums dealing with Iran and North Korea suffer comparable failures, the consequence will be a world of unchecked proliferation, not controlled by either governing principles or functioning institutions. A modern, strong, peaceful Iran could become a pillar of stability and progress in the region. This cannot happen unless Iran's leaders decide whether they are representing a cause or a nation - whether their basic motivation is crusading or international cooperation. The goal of the diplomacy of the Six should be to oblige Iran to confront this choice.

Our greatest foreign policy problem is our divisions at home. Our greatest foreign policy need is national cohesion and a return to the awareness that in foreign policy we are all engaged in a common national endeavor.

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.