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

Henry A. Kissinger

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Henry A. Kissinger
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University

More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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For any student of history, change is the law of life. Any attempt to contain it guarantees an explosion down the road the more rigid the adherence to the status quo, the more violent the ultimate outcome will be.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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 A. Kissinger
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I see the future of China as growth. I think that historically China has often gone through periods of consolidation, and then periods of sort of weakening central authority. They undoubtedly face tremendous challenges.
Henry A. Kissinger
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It is not often that nations learn from the past even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it. For the lessons of historical experience, as of personal experience, are contingent. They teach the consequences of certain actions, but they cannot force a recognition of comparable situations.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
Henry A. Kissinger
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University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The nuclear weapons were not useful for the achievement of political objectives.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.
Henry A. Kissinger
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If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere
Henry A. Kissinger
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The Gorbachev period is conceived as an abandonment of historic Russian positions. So this is the framework, in my view, in which Putin operates.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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.
Henry A. Kissinger
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You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.
Henry A. Kissinger
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[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The American formal position has been that we oppose violence by governments against their people. That principle should not be abandoned.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I think China will do nothing to obstruct it, and they probably will go along with it.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Does anyone have any questions for my answers?
Henry A. Kissinger
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There is no realism without an element of idealism.
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