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It is not often that nations learn from the past even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it. For the lessons of historical experience, as of personal experience, are contingent. They teach the consequences of certain actions, but they cannot force a recognition of comparable situations.

Henry A. Kissinger

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Henry A. Kissinger
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More quotes by 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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Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states.
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Let us fashion together a new world order.
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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.
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With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears.
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Democracy is too important to leave up to the votes of the people.
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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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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.
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I go out with actresses because I'm not apt to marry one.
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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 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.
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If you control the oil you control the country if you control food, you control the population.
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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
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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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Iraq has to be made an international, and not just a national American problem.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.
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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To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal
Henry A. Kissinger
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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