Quote

A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.

Henry A. Kissinger

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Henry A. Kissinger
Risk
Confines
Leader
Stagnation
Experience
Doom
Running
Runs
People
Role
Understood
Leadership
Outstrips
Roles
Dooms

More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

Image
Let us fashion together a new world order.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
I was always convinced that decent people in the case of Vietnam, highly intelligent, decent people, got us involved because they had made, in part, a misjudgment about the nature of the communist system and the unity of the communist world and the degree to which the experience of Europe could be repeated in Vietnam.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
I don't read books, I write them.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
We cannot give Russia veto over deployment of forces on NATO territory. But we have to understand their particular sensitivities, and, therefore, there should be a dialogue on these issues.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
The important thing is to do the right thing. Then credibility will follow.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
In my particular case foreign policy happens to be my hobby, my consuming interest. I had spent decades studying it.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
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
Image
Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities. Demonization is not a policy it is an alibi for the absence of one. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
Before there was the Soviet Union that could inflame matters. Now you have states not as powerful as the Soviet Union, but states like Iraq, like Iran, and to some extent Syria, having made it possible for some of these groups to operate. So it is a very difficult situation.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
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.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
If we do what is necessary, all the odds are in our favor.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
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.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
When I became security advisor, I became familiar with the so-called SIOP war plans, I called in Secretary McNamara and asked him what they were hiding from me, because I couldn't believe that the National policy would foresee such a level of destructiveness.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
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.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.
Henry A. Kissinger