Henry a. kissinger quotes

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

Nothing is more urgent than a serious, dare I say compassionate, debate as to where we are going at home and abroad. Technicians cannot master revolutions; every great achievement was an idea before it became a reality. Cathedrals cannot be built by those who are paralyzed by doubt or consumed by cynicism. If a society loses the capacity for great conception, it can be administered but not governed.

For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one. Putin is a serious strategist – on the premises of Russian history. Understanding US values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point among US policymakers.’

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

I knew Deng Xiaoping when he came out of prison. He had, after all, been imprisoned for nearly ten years by Mao. I know what China looked like before he took over, and so in my own mind, I don't think of Deng Xiaoping as an oppressor. I think of somebody who, faced with that crisis, made a very painful and decision with which I cannot agree. But I also think of him as a great reformer.

Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.

The one thing man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by a World Government, a New World Order.

Countries do not assume burdens because it is fair, only because it is necessary.

I believe in freedom of expression, and I believe that societies thrive when they permit freedom of expression.

In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.

In 10 years, there will be no more Israel.

In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.

Superstars strive for approbation; heroes walk alone. Superstars crave consensus; heroes define themselves by the judgment of a future they see it as their task to bring about. Superstars seek success in a technique for eliciting support; heroes pursue success as the outgrowth of inner values.

China is a country with a record of continuous self-government going back 4,000 years, the only society that has achieved this. One must start with the assumption that they must have learnt something about the requirements for survival, and it is not always to be assumed that we know it better than they do.

A return to the 1967 lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival.

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

A diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure.

An Iranian moderate is one who has run out of ammunition.

How to Achieve The New World Order

You become a superpower by being strong but also by being wise and by being farsighted. But no state is strong or wise enough to create a world order alone.

It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.

The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.

The Israelis want security. The Arabs want dignity. And they consider the demands of each other as incompatible.

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

You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.

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

Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.

While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.

No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.

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. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system

China has had a long and complex history and has managed to evolve its own culture for 4,000 years. It therefore not necessarily true that we know exactly what is best for the internal structure of China.

World population needs to be decreased by 50%

Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side's outpost against the other - it should function as a bridge between them.

The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.

Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries

Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.

I grew up in Germany during the Nazi period, and I came to this country when I was 15. And then I had to work in a factory because we had no resources. And I went to night school. So, it was not a rational ambition for me to become a world statesman.

I know Hillary Clinton as a person. And as a personal friend, I would say yes, she'd be a good president. But she'd put me under a great conflict of interest if she were a candidate because I intend to support the Republicans.

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

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

Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.

I am against portraying China as the demon of the global community. China has grasped more quickly than other countries what globalization means and what it demands. The country has learned how to use other people's innovations for itself. India, incidentally, is not far behind China in this respect. Both are not nations in the European sense, but rather cultural communities with enormous markets. The challenge of the future is to work out how to deal with that.

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

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

Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.

There are some people who think that at some time in the future, China may challenge us for supremacy in the Pacific, and therefore, what do we do today to prevent that? And you, of course, will say that we will try to thwart any economic progress in China. If we engaged in such a policy, we would turn a billion-plus people into nationalist opponents of the United States.

Does anyone have any questions for my answers?

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

History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.

To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall--that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.

If we do what is necessary, all the odds are in our favor.

Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government

Clearly security without values is like a ship without a rudder. But values without security are like a rudder without a ship.

If you control the food, you control a nation. If you control the energy, you control a region. If you control the money, you control the world.

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

I don't read books, I write them.

The reason prophets are so rarely honored in their own country is that their role is to transcend the limits of their contemporaries' experience and imagination. They achieve recognition only when their vision has been turned into experience - in short, when it is too late to benefit from their foresight.

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad name.

I've often said that the desire to lecture China on how it should behave in the world is wrong. China was around for thousands of years even before America existed. It could even be that China's growing power will allow itself to be slowed down. But as long as this immense empire doesn't fall apart, it will become an important factor in global politics.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been. The public does not fully understand the world into which it is going. Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision. Those leaders who do not are ultimately judged failures, even though they may be popular at the moment.

An expert is someone who articulates the needs of those in power.

There is no realism without an element of idealism.

In a diplomatic negotiation, you always meet the same the other side all the time. Even if you should succeed in outsmarting him or in pressuring him, it only sets up a cycle in which he will try to get even.

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

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

I have been observing China for more than 30 years and am impressed how logically and wisely it tackles its problems. Obviously the international system could be unbalanced by China's rising power - if we don't prepare ourselves for the new competitive situation, that is. But it is an economic challenge, not aggression on the level of Hitler.

I grew up as a discriminated minority in a dictatorship, so obviously the issue of human rights is a matter of concern for me.

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

I don't stand on protocol. Just call me your Excellency.

Every success is usually an admission ticket to a new set of decisions.

Deng Xiaoping thought of himself as a great revolutionary and a great reformer. He had dismantled the Chinese communist management of the economy. In my next-to-last conversation with him, which was about six months before Tiananmen Square, he said to me that his aim would be the next phase to reduce the Communist Party to philosophical issues. And I said, "What's a philosophical issue?" And he said, "Well, like if we make an alliance with Russia." Given his view of Russia, that was not the likeliest thing that would ever happen.

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.

NAFTA represents the single most creative step towards a New World Order.

In the short term, it would not have made it possible to resume relations, because in the Chinese mind, the humiliation of China started with the annexation of Taiwan by Japan. If the United States had suddenly declared Taiwan as a separate state - for which we would have had no support among other nations - the consequences would have been giving up our relationship with China and committing ourselves to a long-term conflict with China.

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.

Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven't seen.

The enemies you make by taking a decided stand generally have more respect for you than the friends you make by being on the fence

Democracy is too important to leave up to the votes of the people.

The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.

The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities. Demonization is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction.

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.

Let us fashion together a new world order.

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 China would do, I cannot predict. China has all but given up the claim to the use of force, except in the circumstance of Taiwan declaring its independence. That is a huge step forward over what the situation was many years ago.

I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas. And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy.

I think that his [Obama's] task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period, when really a New World Order can be created.

People think responsibility is hard to bear. It's not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.

U.S. policy toward the third world should be one of depopulation

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

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.

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

The important thing is to do the right thing. Then credibility will follow.

The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.

Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." [...] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that.

For any student of history, change is the law of life. Any attempt to contain it guarantees an explosion down the road; the more rigid the adherence to the status quo, the more violent the ultimate outcome will be.

Donald Rumsfeld is the most ruthless man I have ever met? and I mean that as a compliment.

[The New World Order] cannot happen without U.S. participation, as we are the most significant single component. Yes, there will be a New World Order, and it will force the United States to change it's perceptions.

The challenge is whether China as a rising country, the United States as the superpower, can develop a cooperative relationship in this period before nationalism becomes so dominant in China as a substitute for communism, and a kind of self-righteous isolationism in this country that substitutes China for the Soviet Union.

If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere

The elderly are useless eaters.

Statesman create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator.

It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.

The issues are too important to be left for the voters.

Over time even two armed blind men in a room can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

The Western concept of democracy is based on the idea that the loser of an election has the possibility next time round of being the winner. But in the case of an ethnically or religiously divided country, in which minorities don't live peacefully together, this necessary balance can't be properly guaranteed by democracy. When each ethnic group arms itself, it is not surprising that the army of a new state is viewed by part of the population as an ideological militia.

We cannot give Russia veto over deployment of forces on NATO territory. But we have to understand their particular sensitivities, and, therefore, there should be a dialogue on these issues.

Americans believe that you can alter people by conversion, and that everybody in the world is a potential American. The Chinese also believe that their values are universal, but they do not believe that you can convert to becoming a Chinese unless you are born into it.

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