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Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

Henry A. Kissinger

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Henry A. Kissinger
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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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Let us fashion together a new world order.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The first reactions are often instinctive. So one of the first things we said was that the Chinese had no right to inspect the plane, and that we had a sovereign right to. I don't know what the legal position is, but it was surely psychologically absolutely the unwise thing to do.
Henry A. Kissinger
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You become a superpower by being strong but also by being wise and by being farsighted. But no state is strong or wise enough to create a world order alone.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I grew up in Germany during the Nazi period, and I came to this country when I was 15. And then I had to work in a factory because we had no resources. And I went to night school. So, it was not a rational ambition for me to become a world statesman.
Henry A. Kissinger
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No, [the U.S.] has made it clear that we consider a peaceful resolution an essential aspect of American foreign policy. This I believe to be a situation understood by China, but again, it is important to not sound too truculent. Taking on a billion-plus Chinese is not an enterprise which one should enter lightly.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Peace depends ultimately not on political arrangements but on the conscience of mankind.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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.
Henry A. Kissinger
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One thing I don't want around me is a military intellectual. I don't have to worry about you on that score.
Henry A. Kissinger
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You're 18 points down [in the polls]... You might as well do what's right.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The Chinese, on the other hand, were in the position of having an American military spy plane on a Chinese military base and they had their own internal problems to deal with. At first, the Chinese weren't all that belligerent. They were just stalling to get their own bureaucracy in line.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?
Henry A. Kissinger
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Realism in foreign policy is made up of a clear set of values, since difficult foreign policy decisions are often decided with the narrowest of majorities. Without any sense of what is right and wrong, one would drown in a flood of difficult and pragmatic decisions.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I grew up as a discriminated minority in a dictatorship, so obviously the issue of human rights is a matter of concern for me.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
Henry A. Kissinger
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We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.
Henry A. Kissinger