Henry Kissinger Quotes

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

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

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

“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.”

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

“Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.”

“History is the memory of states.”

“Even a paranoid can have enemies.”

“If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.”

“In crises, the most daring course is often safest.”

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

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

“As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren't realized, of wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy. As a statesman, one has to act on the assumption that problems must be solved.”

“The United States is seeking a peace that heals. We have had many armistices in Indochina. We want a peace that will last.”

“A leader must balance fidelity to history with analysis of the present and intuition for the future. The leader weighs those elements of reality which offer opportunities for vision, those which must be managed, and those which steel society for its tests.”

“We have tended to believe that we could bring peace by spreading democracy all over the world and we equated foreign policy with a kind of missionary work. And we have tended to divide our approach between those who thought foreign policy was a subdivision of psychiatry and others who thought foreign policy was a subdivision of theology, and neither of them is adequate to the present situation.”

“There is no country in the world where it is conceivable that a man of my origin could be standing here next to the President of the United States. And if my origin can contribute anything to the formulation of our policy, it is that at an early age I have seen what can happen to a society that is based on hatred and strength and distrust.”

“The prophet deals with eternal verities. The policymaker lives in the world of the contingent; he or she must deal with partial answers that hopefully are on the road to truth. Contingent answers are always somewhat inadequate; but the attempt to achieve the ultimate in a finite period of time can produce extraordinary disasters. Crusades have caused even more casualties than wars of national interest.”

“I've been thinking about these problems all my life. It's my hobby as well as my occupation. And so the recommendations I made were the best of which I was then capable.”

“The best a statesman can do is to listen carefully to the footsteps of God as he wanders through history, try to get ahold of his cloak and walk with him a few steps of the way.”