Henry A. Kissinger Quotes - Page 8

I want to thank you for stopping the applause. It is impossible for me to look humble for any period of time.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

I have learned, as I wrote, that history must be discovered, not declared. It's an admission that one grows in life.

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

The Chinese military budget today is officially listed as, I think, about $15 billion. But even if you double it, that's only a tenth of ours. So the possibility of China challenging the United States for the next ten years over the Pacific is next to zero. There could be a conflict between us and China over Taiwan, but I think that, too, will not occur with the proper policies on both sides.

The key decision for a statesman is whether to commit his nation or not. There is no middle course. Once a great nation commits itself, it must prevail. It will acquire no kudos for translating its inner doubts into hesitation.

If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.

We have to be careful in negotiating with Iran that we don't create the impression among the Arab states and the Sunni states that we are working on a condominium between Iran and the United States, because that will panic them and drive them into making their own arrangement.

In my particular case foreign policy happens to be my hobby, my consuming interest. I had spent decades studying it.

The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.

History is the memory of States.

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.

In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.

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

Well, the capacity of French intellectuals to understand a Texan way of thinking is finite.

Realism in foreign policy means careful consideration of all aspects pertinent to the issue, before taking a decision. This is the only way you can move from where you are to someplace else.

Every time there has been an attempt to disturb it, it led to two things. It led to immediate intense conflict with China, and it led to a reaffirmation in the end, because nobody wanted a major confrontation with China to this principle of a "one China" policy within which Taiwan is finding a place now. Its own position has greatly improved since the Nixon policy. It is richer, it is stronger and it is participating in many international organizations.

The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.

I don't know what happens in the next years. But I cannot now design a policy in which we try to keep China from developing, because in some years, if they develop, they might be rich enough to challenge us, and adopt the principle that we will hold down any state that might in the future become strong. That would make us a world empire for which we wouldn't have the talents or the convictions.

I also do not believe that the United States can let itself be driven into a political role by escalating terrorism, and therefore, the leaders of the Arab world and Arafat should do their utmost to put an end to this and then the United States should do its utmost to produce a political solution.

China is a one party state. Sooner or later China will get to the point when the new social classes, which have emerged thanks to economic success, will have to be integrated into the political system. There is no guarantee that this process will run smoothly.

In relations with many domestically weak countries, a radio transmitter can be a more effective form of pressure than a squadron B-52s.

It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.