Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

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.

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

No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.

What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

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

The nuclear weapons were not useful for the achievement of political objectives.

I don't read books, I write them.

Historically when there is a rising power like China, it has usually led to confrontations between the rising power and the existing dominant powers. And when you have a shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, then you have an additional element.

Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.

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.

If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.

Our concern for human rights comes to the fore when there are gross violations of human decencies. Then other countries, including China, must recognize that this affects the American attitude towards their country. But towards what precise institutions will it evolve? I think we ought to leave something to history.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

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

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

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.

We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.

I don't think we should pay people to fight terrorism. I would be amazed if they asked for anything in return.

China is a one party state. Sooner or later China will get to the point when the new social classes, which have emerged thanks to economic success, will have to be integrated into the political system. There is no guarantee that this process will run smoothly.

You're 18 points down [in the polls]... You might as well do what's right.

I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.

There is no realism without an element of idealism.

A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.

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.

Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?

The problem is Russia is a country that has lost 300 years of its history, in terms of most of what was part of the Russian Empire in Europe, towards Europe, since Peter the Great, has been the territory that is no longer under Russian rule.

We're at a moment when the international system is in a period of change like we haven't seen for several hundred years. In some parts of the world, the nation state, on which the existing international system was based, is either giving up its traditional aspects, like in Europe, or as in the Middle East, where it was never really fully established, it is no longer the defining element. So in those two parts of the world, there is tremendous adjustment in traditional concepts.