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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.

Henry A. Kissinger

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Henry A. Kissinger
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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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Historically when there is a rising power like China, it has usually led to confrontations between the rising power and the existing dominant powers. And when you have a shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, then you have an additional element.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Peace depends ultimately not on political arrangements but on the conscience of mankind.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The history of things that didn't happen has never been written.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Many of the scientists have believed that their contribution to ending the nuclear race is not to let any new weapons to be developed.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Baseball is the most intellectual game because most of the action goes on in your head.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I believe it is a mistake to isolate arms control from other areas of policy.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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.
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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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
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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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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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In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.
Henry A. Kissinger
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There is no realism without an element of idealism.
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.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.
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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Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.
Henry A. Kissinger
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You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.
Henry A. Kissinger
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University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.
Henry A. Kissinger