Henry A. Kissinger Quotes - Page 6

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

We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.

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

The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples.

This country cannot afford to tear itself apart on a partisan basis on issues so vital to our national security.

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

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.

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

People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any form that would require me to stop talking for three hours.

What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.

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

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

Our greatest foreign policy problem is our divisions at home. Our greatest foreign policy need is national cohesion and a return to the awareness that in foreign policy we are all engaged in a common national endeavor.

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.

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

Now when I bore people at a party they think it's their fault.

The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.

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.

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.

Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.

Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

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.

John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

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