Kissinger Quotes

In 1969 the Khmer Rouge numbered only about 4,000. By 1975 their numbers were enough to defeat the government forces. Their victory was greatly helped by the American attack on Cambodia, which was carried out as an extension of the Vietnam War. In 1970 a military coup led by Lon Nol, possibly with American support, overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, and American and South Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia.

One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War.

The decision to bomb was taken by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and was originally justified on the grounds that North Vietnamese bases had been set up in Cambodia. The intention (according to a later defence by Kissinger's aide, Peter W. Rodman) was to target only places with few Cambodians: 'From the Joint Chiefs' memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians. The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT; the overall programme was given the name MENU.' Rodman makes the point that SUPPER, for instance, had troop concentrations, anti-aircraft, artillery, rocket and mortar positions, ~ Jonathan Glover

I think China will do nothing to obstruct it, and they probably will go along with it. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Americans have a tendency to believe that when there's a problem there must be a solution. ~ Henry Kissinger

One thing I don't want around me is a military intellectual. I don't have to worry about you on that score. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

China has had a long and complex history and has managed to evolve its own culture for 4,000 years. It therefore not necessarily true that we know exactly what is best for the internal structure of China. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Because in this view the domestic principles of an Islamic state were divinely ordained, non-Muslim political entities were illegitimate; they could never be accepted by Muslim states as truly equal counterparts. A peaceful world order depended on the ability to forge and expand a unitary Islamic entity, not on an equilibrium of competing parts. ~ Henry Kissinger

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God ~ Henry Kissinger

Henceforth the adequacy of any military establishment will be tested by its ability to preserve the peace. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Let us fashion together a new world order. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

The qualifications that I have to speak on world affairs are exactly the same ones Henry Kissinger has, and Walt Rostow has, or anybody in the Political Science Department, professional historians - none, none that you don't have. The only difference is, I don't pretend to have qualifications, nor do I pretend that qualifications are needed. I mean, if somebody were to ask me to give a talk on quantum physics, I'd refuse - because I don't understand enough. But world affairs are trivial: there's nothing in the social sciences or history or whatever that is beyond the intellectual capacities of an ordinary fifteen-year-old. You have to do a little work, you have to do some reading, you have to be able to think but there's nothing deep - if there are any theories around that require some special kind of training to understand, then they've been kept a carefully guarded secret. ~ Noam Chomsky

When the Chinese court deigned to send envoys abroad, they were not diplomats, but "Heavenly Envoys" from the Celestial Court. ~ Henry Kissinger

Like any developing country, it has an inequality of wealth. In the Chinese case, it is particularly [pronounced] by the fact that they decided they couldn't make the whole country move forward simultaneously, so they've started region by region. So the interior regions are much less well off than the coastal regions. And this is certainly a huge challenge, because it produces a flow of populations from the poorer regions to the richer regions. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

In my particular case foreign policy happens to be my hobby, my consuming interest. I had spent decades studying it. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph. ~ Richard Avedon

As much as Henry Kissinger wanted to attribute historical movement to impersonal forces, he too conceded to "the difference personalities make". ~ Walter Isaacson

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

The American Senate remained focused on domestic priorities and thwarted all expansionist projects. It kept the army small (25,000 men) and the navy weak. Until 1890, the American army ranked fourteenth in the world, after Bulgaria's, and the American navy was smaller than Italy's even though America's industrial strength was thirteen times that of Italy. America did not participate in international conferences and was treated as a second-rank power. In 1880, when Turkey reduced its diplomatic establishment, it eliminated its embassies in Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States. At the same time, a German diplomat in Madrid offered to take a cut in salary rather than be posted to Washington.18 ~ Henry Kissinger

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

No, [the U.S.] has made it clear that we consider a peaceful resolution an essential aspect of American foreign policy. This I believe to be a situation understood by China, but again, it is important to not sound too truculent. Taking on a billion-plus Chinese is not an enterprise which one should enter lightly. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate's convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a "big data" research effort into individuals' likely preferences and prejudices? ~ Henry Kissinger

It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions. ~ Henry Kissinger

Power is the great aphrodisiac. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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

The consensus that had sustained our postwar foreign policy had evaporated. The men and women who had sustained our international commitments and achievements were demoralized by what they considered their failure in Vietnam. Too many of our young were in rebellion against the successes of their fathers, attacking what they claimed to be the overextension of our commitments and mocking the values that had animated the achievements. A new isolationism was growing. Whereas in the 1920s we had withdrawn from the world because we thought we were too good for it, the insidious theme of the late 1960s was that we should withdraw from the world because we were too evil for it. Not ~ Henry Kissinger

Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad. ~ Henry Kissinger

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer. ~ Henry Kissinger

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. ~ Eugene Jarecki

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Postcolonial countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial ~ Henry Kissinger

The lowest form of war is To attack Cities. Siege warfare Is a last resort ... The Skillful Strategist Defeats the enemy Without doing battle, Captures the city Without laying siege, Overthrows the enemy state Without protracted war.34 ~ Henry Kissinger

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

Because complexity inhibits flexibility, early choices are especially crucial. ~ Henry Kissinger

Helmut, if I had known that one can make it to 90 on 60 cigarettes a day, I would have started smoking 30 years ago. [at Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's 90th birthday] ~ Henry Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy. ~ Henry Kissinger

Roosevelt returned to this theme in his fourth inaugural address in 1945: We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that "The only way to have a friend is to be one." We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust or with fear. ~ Henry Kissinger

Together they [President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger] pursued ends that frequently had a tenuous link with reality, using means that were not merely disproportionate but counterproductive and untrue to those values they were meant to defend. In fact neither man demonstrated much faith in those values. ~ William Shawcross

Deliberative assemblies shall be widely established and all matters decided by open discussion. 3. All classes, high and low, shall be united in vigorously carrying out the administration of affairs of state. 4. The common people, no less than the civil and military officials, shall all be allowed to pursue their own calling so that there may be no discontent. 5. Evil customs of the past shall be broken off and everything based upon the just laws of Nature. 6. Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule. ~ Henry Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

May not lead to reduction in U.S. casualties until its final stages, as our casualty rate may be unrelated to the total number of American troops in South Vietnam. To kill about 150 U.S. soldiers a week, the enemy needs to attack only a small portion of our forces ... . ~ Henry Kissinger

Kissinger traces the balances made in foreign policy, including that of realism and idealism, from the times of Cardinal Richelieu through chapters on Theodore Roosevelt the realist and Woodrow Wilson the idealist. Kissinger, a European refugee who has read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. "No other nation," he wrote in Diplomacy, "has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism." Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he pointed out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable. ~ Walter Isaacson

The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive. ~ Henry Kissinger

Constantly changing shape as its rulers annexed contiguous territories, Russia was an empire out of scale in comparison with any of the European countries. Moreover, with every new conquest, the character of the state changed as it incorporated another brand-new, restive, non-Russian ethnic group. This was one of the reasons Russia felt obliged to maintain huge armies whose size was unrelated to any plausible threat to its external security. ~ Henry Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

It is almost always a mistake for heads of state to undertake the details of a negotiation. They are then obliged to master specifics normally handled by their foreign offices and are deflected onto subjects more appropriate to their subordinates, while being kept from issues only heads of state can resolve. Since no one without a well-developed ego reaches the highest office, compromise is difficult and deadlocks are dangerous. With the domestic positions of the interlocutors so often dependent on at least the semblance of success, negotiations more often concentrate on obscuring differences than they do on dealing with the essence of a problem. ~ Henry Kissinger

History knows no resting places and no plateaus ~ Henry Kissinger

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

I have been observing China for more than 30 years and am impressed how logically and wisely it tackles its problems. Obviously the international system could be unbalanced by China's rising power - if we don't prepare ourselves for the new competitive situation, that is. But it is an economic challenge, not aggression on the level of Hitler. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Everybody who has dealt with China over an extended period of time has come to more or less the same conclusions. There are nuances of differences, but not fundamental differences. I think that President Bush was heading in this direction, and I have no doubt that he will again wind up in this position. But right now he has to be preoccupied with the atrocity committed in New York and Washington. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Discovering the inapplicability of Judeo-Christian morality in certain circumstances involving affairs of state can be searing. The rare individuals who have recognized the necessity of violating such morality, acted accordingly, and taken responsibility for their actions are among the most necessary leaders for their countries, even as they have caused great unease ..

- In Defense of Henry Kissinger, The Atlantic 2013 May

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/p... ~ Robert D. Kaplan

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 ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Any international system must have two key elements for it to work. One, it has to have a certain equilibrium of power that makes overthrowing the system difficult and costly. Secondly, it has to have a sense of legitimacy. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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. ~ Leon Golub

Kissinger warned about the dangers of dealing with the Soviet Union precisely at the moment that Reagan was able to achieve real accomplishments with Gorbachev. In later years he would move closer to the neocons, ultimately becoming a prominent supporter of the Iraq war - another sign of Kissinger`s almost infallible ability to get it wrong. ~ Jacob Heilbrunn

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

President [Ronald] Reagan never has tried to become an expert on military matters. He never has endeavored to learn the most important details in that field, which lead to a situation in which his aides played a much greater roles than aides would have played under President Ford or let us say in the whole Nixon-Ford-Kissinger era. ~ Helmut Schmidt

It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true. ~ Henry Kissinger

The enemies you make by taking a decided stand generally have more respect for you than the friends you make by being on the fence ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Especially when ultimate decisions of peace and war are involved, a strategist must be aware that bluffs may be called and must take into account the impact on his future credibility of an empty threat. ~ Henry Kissinger

It is . . . a melancholy fact that the countries which are most humanitarian, which are most interested in internal improvement, tend to grow weaker compared with the other countries which possess a less altruistic civilization . . ~ Henry Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

This body of thought represents an almost total inversion of Westphalian world order. In the purist version of Islamism, the state cannot be the point of departure for an international system because states are secular, hence illegitimate; at best they may achieve a kind of provisional status en route to a religious entity on a larger scale. Noninterference in other countries' domestic affairs cannot serve as a governing principle, because national loyalties represent deviations from the true faith and because jihadists have a duty to transform dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers. Purity, not stability, is the guiding principle of this conception of world order. ~ Henry Kissinger

The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else. The current state of suspended animation, however, cannot last. If the courts and lawyers of this country will not do their duty, we shall watch as the victims and survivors of this man pursue justice and vindication in their own dignified and painstaking way, and at their own expense, and we shall be put to shame. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Nixon's the kind of guy that if you were drowning fifty feet off shore, he'd throw you a thirty foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the President had met you more than half-way. ~ Mort Sahl

If we focus on the meat, this contrast is, financial death and warrior death, a split which Oswald Spengler calls 'hunger death' and 'hero death'.

The hungry human, in a 9 to 5 existence is threatened, dishonored, and debased by financial worry and the fear of mental starving, which stunts possibilities, chokes consciousness, produces darkness and pressure not less than starvation in the literal sense. You can lose your whole life-will through the gaping wretchedness of living in the modern world of debt and work. The tragedy is that in the modern world, you die of something (starvation, disease, boredom) and not for something (death by action).

In waring and fighting, you sacrifice for higher policies, you can die for something higher, you full for a metaphysics, a mode of consciousness higher than your meat body. On the other hand, economic life merely waste you away. Spengler writes, 'War is the creature, hunger the destroyer, of all things'.

In war life is elevated by death, often to the point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory. But in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, the vulgar, and wholly un-metaphysical form of fearfulness for one's life under which the higher form of being a human miserably collapses and the naked struggle for survival of the human beast begins.

By the warrior, Evola isn't writing about what Henry Kissinger called 'dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign polic ~ Moesy Pittounikos

American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger's undisclosed reason for the 'tilt' was the supposed but never materialised 'brokerage' offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was 'a basket case' before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. ~ William M. Arkin

NAFTA represents the single most creative step towards a New World Order. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Clearly security without values is like a ship without a rudder. But values without security are like a rudder without a ship. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. ~ Tom Lehrer

One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if applied correctly to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old problems of violent conflict. Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted in the Internet age, this theory posits, because "people who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners. With more data, everyone gains a better frame of reference. ~ Henry Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The issues are too important to be left for the voters. ~ Henry Kissinger

One theory is that we will make war look so attractive that we undermine the deterrent. That's Never Never Land. What we have now would have been enough to deter Hitler. But we are talking in a different order of reality. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

But Japan drew from the challenge the opposite conclusion as China: it threw open its doors to foreign technology and overhauled its institutions in an attempt to replicate the Western powers' rise. ~ Henry Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security ~ Henry Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Every success is usually an admission ticket to a new set of decisions. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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

To revolutionaries the significant reality is the world which they are fighting to bring about, not the world they are fighting to overcome. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

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

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. ~ Henry A. Kissinger