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When I became security advisor, I became familiar with the so-called SIOP war plans, I called in Secretary McNamara and asked him what they were hiding from me, because I couldn't believe that the National policy would foresee such a level of destructiveness.

Henry A. Kissinger

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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.
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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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University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.
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He [Deng Xiaoping] said that he did not understand why we failed to grasp that the alternative was not democracy, but total chaos and risking all the reforms that had been achieved.
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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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You become a superpower by being strong but also by being wise and by being farsighted. But no state is strong or wise enough to create a world order alone.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I have always expressed respect for those people who make public declarations.
Henry A. Kissinger
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[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.
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
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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.
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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.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.
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.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The nuclear weapons were not useful for the achievement of political objectives.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Let me make my point about Vietnam. When the Nixon initiation came into office, there were 550,000 Americans in combat. And ending the war was not a question of turning off a television channel. And so, debating on how we got there and what judgments were made was not going to help us.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I know Hillary Clinton as a person. And as a personal friend, I would say yes, she'd be a good president. But she'd put me under a great conflict of interest if she were a candidate because I intend to support the Republicans.
Henry A. Kissinger
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If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.
Henry A. Kissinger
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No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Nixon had three goals: to win by the biggest electoral landslide in history to be remembered as a peacemaker and to be accepted by the 'Establishment' as an equal. He achieved all these objectives at the end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973. And he lost them all two months later-partly because he turned a dream into an obsession.
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American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.
Henry A. Kissinger