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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
Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.
Henry A. Kissinger
Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.
Henry A. Kissinger
This country cannot afford to tear itself apart on a partisan basis on issues so vital to our national security.
Henry A. Kissinger
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
China is a country with a record of continuous self-government going back 4,000 years, the only society that has achieved this. One must start with the assumption that they must have learnt something about the requirements for survival, and it is not always to be assumed that we know it better than they do.
Henry A. Kissinger
This is awful. Do it again.
Henry A. Kissinger
John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.
Henry A. Kissinger
I don't think that that's a desirable option for us. Besides, it wouldn't work, because there are too many other countries that are willing to work economically with China. But I don't think the basic relationship depends on economics. It depends on a political understanding of what is required for peace in Asia.
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
What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system
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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
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
I want to thank you for stopping the applause. It is impossible for me to look humble for any period of time.
Henry A. Kissinger
90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad name.
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
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
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
Henry A. Kissinger
Iraq has to be made an international, and not just a national American problem.
Henry A. Kissinger
While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.
Henry A. Kissinger
University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.
Henry A. Kissinger
