Henry A. Kissinger Quotes - Page 4

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

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

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

It is frankly a mistake of amateurs to believe you can gain the upper hand in a diplomatic negotiation.

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.

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

The history of things that didn't happen has never been written.

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

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.

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

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.

Every American president, regardless of party, has said that America has an intense interest in a peaceful resolution. And I think it should be left at that.

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

The mistake we make with many people - not just Russia - is that we believe we have the model, and there is a sort of a condescension in our dialogue with other societies, which was especially painful in several administrations to Russia. I think in Russia, the Yeltsin period is not considered a period of great achievement, but a period of corruption and humiliation.

I think Vladimir Putin will give up power.

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.

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.

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

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