Henry Kissinger quotes
Born
May 27, 1923, Fürth, Bavaria, Weimar Republic.
Died
November 29, 2023.
Occupation
Politician.
Henry Kissinger was an American politician, diplomat. Kissinger played a prominent role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977.
To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.
– Henry Kissinger
A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
– Henry Kissinger
The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples.
– Henry Kissinger
Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.
– Henry Kissinger
No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.
– Henry Kissinger
Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
– Henry Kissinger
Even a paranoid can have enemies.
– Henry Kissinger
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
– Henry Kissinger
While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.
– Henry Kissinger
The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.
– Henry Kissinger
The statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between his nation’s experience and his vision.
– Henry Kissinger
In crises the most daring course is often safest.
– Henry Kissinger
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.
– Henry Kissinger
Every first-term president has to learn something after he comes into office. Nobody can be completely ready for the inevitable crises.
– 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
Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came in to office.
– Henry Kissinger
I have spoken to Chinese leaders occasionally on human rights, but I’ve always done it in private.
– Henry Kissinger
For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.
– Henry Kissinger
Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets.
– Henry Kissinger
You can’t make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria.
– Henry Kissinger
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
– Henry Kissinger
Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction.
– Henry Kissinger
Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.
– Henry Kissinger
The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
– Henry Kissinger
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
– Henry Kissinger
If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.
– Henry Kissinger
It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.
– Henry Kissinger
I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.
– Henry Kissinger
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.
– Henry Kissinger
I have not endorsed Trump and will not do so.
– Henry Kissinger
We are all the President’s men.
– Henry Kissinger
If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.
– Henry Kissinger
There is obviously a gap between the public’s perception of the role of U.S. foreign policy and the elite’s perception.
– Henry Kissinger
The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn’t make it.
– Henry Kissinger
The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
– Henry Kissinger
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
– Henry Kissinger
I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
– Henry Kissinger
Power is the great aphrodisiac.
– Henry Kissinger
Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.
– Henry Kissinger
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
– Henry Kissinger
The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
– Henry Kissinger
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
– Henry Kissinger
The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
– Henry Kissinger