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America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.

Henry A. Kissinger

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Henry A. Kissinger
Permanent
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America
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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I do not criticize people who take a public stand on human rights issues. I express my respect for them. But some people are more influential without a public confrontation.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Many of the scientists have believed that their contribution to ending the nuclear race is not to let any new weapons to be developed.
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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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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In a nuclear war, even if one side were to come out ahead by systems analytical standards, both sides would be so weakened, that it would - they would be in the position of Europe after the two World Wars.
Henry A. Kissinger
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In a diplomatic negotiation, you always meet the same the other side all the time. Even if you should succeed in outsmarting him or in pressuring him, it only sets up a cycle in which he will try to get even.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I think an appeal to American idealism and willingness to sacrifice would be an important contribution, because what is happening now in many countries, not yet in the United States, but in many European countries, it's the inability of government to ask for sacrifices of its people.
Henry A. Kissinger
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There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
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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A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.
Henry A. Kissinger
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American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.
Henry A. Kissinger
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This country cannot afford to tear itself apart on a partisan basis on issues so vital to our national security.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
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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If you mean by military victory an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.
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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The history of things that didn't happen has never been written.
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