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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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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 10 years, there will be no more Israel.
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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.
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Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.
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I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
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If we do what is necessary, all the odds are in our favor.
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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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The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.
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For the Soul of France is masterful history, brilliantly researched, and hard to put down.
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Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.
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No one will ever win the battle of the sexes there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.
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The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities. Demonization is not a policy it is an alibi for the absence of one. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction.
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President Nixon in his inaugural address indicated that he wanted an era of negotiation. Our reasoning was that whatever our ideological differences, whatever our geopolitical differences, we were condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons.
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University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.
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In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.
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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.
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Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
Henry A. Kissinger
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America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.
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.
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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.
Henry A. Kissinger