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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
I tell you, the Pakistanis are fine people, but they are primitive in their mental structure. [...] They just don't have the subtlety of the Indians. (August 10, 1971)
As Kissinger complained to the president, “We are the ones who have been operating against our public opinion, against our bureaucracy, at the very edge of legality.”
For centuries, the Middle Kingdom had assured its security by playing off distant barbarians against immediate neighbors. Deeply worried about Soviet expansionism, Mao adopted the same strategy in his opening to the United States.
Diplomacy (1994)
For nearly twenty years, Bismarck preserved the peace and eased international tension with his moderation and flexibility. But he paid the price of misunderstood greatness, for his successors and would-be imitators could draw no better lesson from his example than multiplying arms and waging a war which would cause the suicide of European civilization.
Diplomacy (1994)
Nixon was one of the most gifted of American Presidents, prepared to make tough decisions and courageous in doing so. But he needed solitude for such an act. Face-to-face, Nixon was obsessively incapable of overruling an interlocutor or even disagreeing with him.
Years of Renewal (1999)
Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system. Empires have no need for a balance of power. That is how the United States has conducted its foreign policy in the Americas, and China through most of its history in Asia.
Diplomacy (1994)
[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.
Wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States.
The Metternich system had been inspired by the eighteenth century notion of the universe as a great clockwork: Its parts were intricately intermeshed, and a disturbance of one upset the equilibrium of the others. Bismarck represented a new age.
It's [Tension between China and the US] the biggest problem for America; it's the biggest problem for the world. Because if we can't solve that, then the risk is that all over the world a kind of cold war will develop between China and the United States.
If Tehran insists on combining the Persian imperial tradition with contemporary Islamic fervor, then a collision with America — and, indeed, with its negotiating partners of the Six — is unavoidable. Iran simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region of such importance to the rest of the world.
Ukraine has always had a special significance for Russia. It was a mistake not to realize that.... Ukraine was part of Russia for a long time. You can’t accept the principle that any country can just change the borders and take a province of another country.
If we do not get a recognition of our interdependence, the Western civilization that we now have is almost certain to disintegrate. (October 1974)
You should tell the Cambodians (i.e., Khmer Rouge) that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in the way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. Tell them the latter part, but don’t tell them what I said before.
In contemporary America, power increasingly gravitates to those with an almost obsessive desire to win it. Whoever does not devote himself monomaniacally to the nominating process, whoever is afraid of it or disdains it, will always be pursuing a mirage, however remarkable his other qualifications. With candidates for the highest office, as with athletes, everything depends upon timing, upon an intuitive ability to seize the opportunity.
If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.
The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.
The reason that university politics is so vicious is that the stakes are so small.
Misattributed
Military men are "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy.
Misattributed
Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?
Misattributed
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