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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.

— Henry Kissinger

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More quotes by Henry Kissinger

The accumulation of nuclear arms has to be constrained if mankind is not to destroy itself.

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

The End of the Road (1982)

Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.

Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

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

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Henry Kissinger (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.