Henry Kissinger

The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.

— Henry Kissinger

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing.

— Henry Kissinger

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

— Henry Kissinger

The attitude of the West and of Russia towards a crisis like Ukraine is diametrically different. The West is trying to establish the legality of any established border. For Russia, Ukraine is part of the Russian patrimony.

— Henry Kissinger

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Henry Kissinger

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

— Henry Kissinger

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

— Henry Kissinger

Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven't seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came in to office.

— Henry Kissinger

People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.

— Henry Kissinger

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Henry Kissinger

... the most fundamental problem of politics, which is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.

— Henry Kissinger

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape — to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.

— Henry Kissinger

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Henry Kissinger

[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.

— Henry Kissinger

Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

It is barely conceivable that there are people who like war.

— Henry Kissinger

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Henry Kissinger

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Henry Kissinger

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

— Henry Kissinger

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.

— 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

It's never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn't know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.

— Henry Kissinger

If you believe that their real intention is to kill you, it isn't unreasonable to believe that they would lie to you.

— Henry Kissinger

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

— Henry Kissinger

A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Henry Kissinger

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

— Henry Kissinger

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

Here, according to the mythology of the liberals, was a peaceful little country that Nixon attacked. The fact that there were four North Vietnamese divisions within 30 miles of Saigon coming across the border killing Americans—killing 500 a week starting within two weeks of Nixon’s inauguration—was ignored in the debate on Cambodia by protesters emphasizing the technical neutrality of Cambodia and ignoring that its ruler had invited our response.

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Henry Kissinger

My view of my role is that together with like-minded men and women, I could help contribute to a bipartisan view of American engagement in the world for another period; I could do my part to overcome this really, in a way, awful period in which we are turning history into personal recriminations, depriving our political system of a serious debate.

— Henry Kissinger

It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

— Henry Kissinger

A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Henry Kissinger

A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.

— Henry Kissinger

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.

— Henry Kissinger

Leadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelt's time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, it's different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.

— Henry Kissinger

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

— Henry Kissinger

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

— Henry Kissinger