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America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.

Henry A. Kissinger

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Henry A. Kissinger
Enemies
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Realpolitik

More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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If you control the food, you control a nation. If you control the energy, you control a region. If you control the money, you control the world.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Well, he keeps saying that, and as defense secretary, of course he has to think of a lot of potential enemies. I do not think it's a wise course to articulate this or to base our policy on it. And I do not see under modern circumstances what we would be fighting about.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Withdrawal of US troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public: The more US troops come home, the more will be demanded.
Henry A. Kissinger
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We have three things in common: Irish wives, the ability to speak for 17 minutes without a verb, and the fact that we both speak with an accent.
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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Every success is usually an admission ticket to a new set of decisions.
Henry A. Kissinger
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History knows no resting places and no plateaus
Henry A. Kissinger
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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
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The defining issue is that the government in Taiwan was considered to be the government of all of China, and the authorities in Beijing were not recognized as a government of China. So Taiwan was the residuary for all of China.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.
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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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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In relations with many domestically weak countries, a radio transmitter can be a more effective form of pressure than a squadron B-52s.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The reason prophets are so rarely honored in their own country is that their role is to transcend the limits of their contemporaries' experience and imagination. They achieve recognition only when their vision has been turned into experience - in short, when it is too late to benefit from their foresight.
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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Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.
Henry A. Kissinger
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In Asia, the nation state still is extremely vital, and of course, then in Africa, a whole new pattern is emerging because the states in Africa reflected the preferences of the colonial powers when they were established.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.
Henry A. Kissinger