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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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Henry A. Kissinger
Trying
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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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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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In 10 years, there will be no more Israel.
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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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Realism in foreign policy is made up of a clear set of values, since difficult foreign policy decisions are often decided with the narrowest of majorities. Without any sense of what is right and wrong, one would drown in a flood of difficult and pragmatic decisions.
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At any rate, mutually assured destruction was never our policy.
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We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.
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History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.
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A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.
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To revolutionaries the significant reality is the world which they are fighting to bring about, not the world they are fighting to overcome.
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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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The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.
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Certainly not a party of the workers and the peasants. In fact, Jiang Zemin in recent weeks has officially said that capitalists and the entrepreneurs should be enrolled in the Communist Party.
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I believe it is a mistake to isolate arms control from other areas of policy.
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Obama is like a chess player who is playing simultaneous chess and has opened his game with an unusual opening.
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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.
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Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Henry A. Kissinger
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A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
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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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Clearly security without values is like a ship without a rudder. But values without security are like a rudder without a ship.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?
Henry A. Kissinger