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Henry Kissinger Quotes
1923–2023 United States
Henry Alfred Kissinger (born Heinz Alfred Kissinger; May 27, 1923 – November 29, 2023) was a German-American politician, diplomat, and geopolitical consultant who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938.
United States Anti-communists Businesspeople Memoirists Nobel laureates Also known as: Henry A. Kissinger, Kissinger, Kissinger, Henry
Random Henry Kissinger quote
65 quotes
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Power is the great aphrodisiac.
Gorbachev knew what his problems were but he acted both too fast and too slowly: too fast for the tolerance of his system, and too slowly to arrest the accelerating collapse.
Diplomacy (1994)
If Communist China agrees to renounce the use of force in the formosa strait, we could consider opening up channels of non-official contact... journalists, students, tourists, etc.
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.
The world’s democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values. A global retreat from balancing power with legitimacy will cause the social contract to disintegrate both domestically and internationally.
In the 1950s and 1960s we put several thousand nuclear weapons into Europe. To be sure, we had no precise idea of what to do with them.
In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role.
If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be anti-Semitic.
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
We are the ones who have been operating against our public opinion, against our bureaucracy, at the very edge of legality.
Dumb stupid animals to be used.
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 issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
[T]he most fundamental problem of politics, which is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.
The frequently voiced view that we should conduct our diplomacy so as to bring about a rift between Communist China and the USSR.
It was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts, because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that.
Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown to me.
These leaks are slowly and systematically destroying us.… It could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy.
In the ideal American universe, diplomats stayed out of strategy, and military personnel completed their task by the time diplomacy started—a view for which America was to pay dearly in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed... History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized.... So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.
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