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In my particular case foreign policy happens to be my hobby, my consuming interest. I had spent decades studying it.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Henry A. Kissinger
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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.
Henry A. Kissinger
Any international system must have two key elements for it to work. One, it has to have a certain equilibrium of power that makes overthrowing the system difficult and costly. Secondly, it has to have a sense of legitimacy.
Henry A. Kissinger
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
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
The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.
Henry A. Kissinger
A diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure.
Henry A. Kissinger
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.
Henry A. Kissinger
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.
Henry A. Kissinger
Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side's outpost against the other - it should function as a bridge between them.
Henry A. Kissinger
The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.
Henry A. Kissinger
The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
Henry A. Kissinger
If you control the food, you control a nation. If you control the energy, you control a region. If you control the money, you control the world.
Henry A. Kissinger
Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.
Henry A. Kissinger
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
The defining issue is that the government in Taiwan was considered to be the government of all of China, and the authorities in Beijing were not recognized as a government of China. So Taiwan was the residuary for all of China.
Henry A. Kissinger
If you control the oil you control the country if you control food, you control the population.
Henry A. Kissinger
The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.
Henry A. Kissinger
I believe in freedom of expression, and I believe that societies thrive when they permit freedom of expression.
Henry A. Kissinger
Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.
Henry A. Kissinger
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Henry A. Kissinger