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Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.

Henry A. Kissinger

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Henry A. Kissinger
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More quotes by 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.
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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.
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It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
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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.
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It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.
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The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.
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What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system
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The history of things that didn't happen has never been written.
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John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.
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[The New World Order] cannot happen without U.S. participation, as we are the most significant single component. Yes, there will be a New World Order, and it will force the United States to change it's perceptions.
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Henceforth the adequacy of any military establishment will be tested by its ability to preserve the peace.
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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.
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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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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
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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.
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With respect to the relationship between nuclear weapons and the advent of détente, one has to consider two things. One, the nature of nuclear weapons in themselves, and secondly, the advent of nuclear parity.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
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Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
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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