Quote

I do not criticize people who take a public stand on human rights issues. I express my respect for them. But some people are more influential without a public confrontation.

Henry A. Kissinger

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Henry A. Kissinger
People
Stand
Issues
Public
Rights
Confrontation
Human
Influential
Humans
Criticize
Without
Express
Take
Respect

More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

Image
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
Image
The members of the Islamic Staye have cut the throat of an American on television. This is an insult to the United States, which requires that we demonstrate that this is not an act that is free. I would strongly favor a strong attack on ISIS for a period that is related to the murder of the American.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
The problem is Russia is a country that has lost 300 years of its history, in terms of most of what was part of the Russian Empire in Europe, towards Europe, since Peter the Great, has been the territory that is no longer under Russian rule.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
If you control the oil you control the country if you control food, you control the population.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
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
Image
Peace depends ultimately not on political arrangements but on the conscience of mankind.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
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
Image
The first reactions are often instinctive. So one of the first things we said was that the Chinese had no right to inspect the plane, and that we had a sovereign right to. I don't know what the legal position is, but it was surely psychologically absolutely the unwise thing to do.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
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
Image
You become a superpower by being strong but also by being wise and by being farsighted. But no state is strong or wise enough to create a world order alone.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
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.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
The American formal position has been that we oppose violence by governments against their people. That principle should not be abandoned.
Henry A. Kissinger
Image
Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side's outpost against the other - it should function as a bridge between them.
Henry A. Kissinger