Henry Kissinger > Quotes

“Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.”
― Henry Kissinger

“Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.”
― Henry Kissinger

“Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”
― Henry Kissinger

“America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”
― Henry Kissinger

“It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.”
― Henry Kissinger

“There can't be a crisis next week, my schedule is already full.”
― Henry Kissinger

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
― Henry Kissinger

“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.”
― Henry Kissinger

“The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been. ”
― Henry Kissinger

“A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security”
― Henry Kissinger

“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
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― Henry Kissinger

“It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”
― Henry Kissinger

“The issues are too important to be left for the voters.”
― Henry Kissinger

“The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault.”
― Henry Kissinger

“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
― Henry Kissinger

“Every victory is only the price of admission to a more difficult problem”
― Henry Kissinger

“A diamond is a chunk of coal that did well under pressure.”
― Henry Kissinger

“It's a pity both sides can't lose (commenting on Iran-Iraq war, 1980 – 1988)”
― Henry Kissinger

“The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small”
― Henry Kissinger

“Poor old Germany. Too big for Europe, too small for the world”
― Henry Kissinger

“Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.”
― Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy

“It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.”
― Henry Kissinger

“The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“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.”
― Henry Kissinger, On China

“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

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

“It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.”
― Henry Kissinger, On China

“There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.”
― Henry A. Kissinger

“Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.”
― Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy

“A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the harmony of the universe.”
― Henry Kissinger