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The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.

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 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
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In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I would have said, before the World Trade Center events, that he would try to get a normal relationship with China - making clear to China what the limits are of what America can accept, but also showing understanding for some of Chinese necessities. I thought he was moving towards the position that I have more or less advocated.
Henry A. Kissinger
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A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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
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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.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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
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While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Certainly not a party of the workers and the peasants. In fact, Jiang Zemin in recent weeks has officially said that capitalists and the entrepreneurs should be enrolled in the Communist Party.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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
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The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.
Henry A. Kissinger
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You're 18 points down [in the polls]... You might as well do what's right.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I don't read books, I write them.
Henry A. Kissinger
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A diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.
Henry A. Kissinger
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He [Deng Xiaoping] said that he did not understand why we failed to grasp that the alternative was not democracy, but total chaos and risking all the reforms that had been achieved.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.
Henry A. Kissinger