Henry Kissinger Quotes

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

“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.”

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

“America has fought five wars since 1945 and has gained its objectives in only one of them, the Gulf War.”

“Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.”

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

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

“Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.”

“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.”

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

“Even a paranoid can have enemies.”

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

“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.”

“I don't ascribe to myself any special competence in economic insight. I translate what I hear from highly intelligent people into political and philosophical propositions.”

“I don't see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.”

“I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

“I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.”

“I have not endorsed Trump and will not do so.”

“I have spoken to Chinese leaders occasionally on human rights, but I've always done it in private.”

“I think that America's recovery of a global strategic view is an absolutely essential element of our foreign policy.”

“If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation – and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.”

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

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

“It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.”

“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.”

“Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.”

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

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

“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.”

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