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Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.

Henry A. Kissinger

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Henry A. Kissinger
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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.
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The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
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Democracy is too important to leave up to the votes of the people.
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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.
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I grew up as a discriminated minority in a dictatorship, so obviously the issue of human rights is a matter of concern for me.
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Clearly security without values is like a ship without a rudder. But values without security are like a rudder without a ship.
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The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
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In my life, I have almost always been on the side of active foreign policy. But you need to know with whom you are cooperating. You need reliable partners.
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Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine.
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A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.
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Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
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While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.
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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.
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You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.
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A nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions.
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Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided more often it is a crisis invited.
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90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad name.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The Israelis want security. The Arabs want dignity. And they consider the demands of each other as incompatible.
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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Does anyone have any questions for my answers?
Henry A. Kissinger