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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
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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger
Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.
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To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal
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Henceforth the adequacy of any military establishment will be tested by its ability to preserve the peace.
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A nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions.
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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.
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Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.
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High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.
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Iraq has to be made an international, and not just a national American problem.
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In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.
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A return to the 1967 lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival.
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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.
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