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The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Henry A. Kissinger
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More quotes by 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
Democracy is too important to leave up to the votes of the people.
Henry A. Kissinger
History knows no resting places and no plateaus
Henry A. Kissinger
Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.
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
Realism in foreign policy is made up of a clear set of values, since difficult foreign policy decisions are often decided with the narrowest of majorities. Without any sense of what is right and wrong, one would drown in a flood of difficult and pragmatic decisions.
Henry A. Kissinger
Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided more often it is a crisis invited.
Henry A. Kissinger
[The New World Order] cannot happen without U.S. participation, as we are the most significant single component. Yes, there will be a New World Order, and it will force the United States to change it's perceptions.
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
The Chinese, on the other hand, were in the position of having an American military spy plane on a Chinese military base and they had their own internal problems to deal with. At first, the Chinese weren't all that belligerent. They were just stalling to get their own bureaucracy in line.
Henry A. Kissinger
A diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure.
Henry A. Kissinger
We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.
Henry A. Kissinger
The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
Henry A. Kissinger
In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.
Henry A. Kissinger
The Gorbachev period is conceived as an abandonment of historic Russian positions. So this is the framework, in my view, in which Putin operates.
Henry A. Kissinger
Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states.
Henry A. Kissinger
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.
Henry A. Kissinger
Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
Henry A. Kissinger
If you control the oil you control the country if you control food, you control the population.
Henry A. Kissinger
Diplomats operate through deadlock, which is the way by which two sides can test each other's determination. Even if they have egos for it few heads of government have the time to resolve stalemates, their meetings are too short and the demands of protocol too heavy.
Henry A. Kissinger