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Realism in foreign policy means careful consideration of all aspects pertinent to the issue, before taking a decision. This is the only way you can move from where you are to someplace else.

Henry A. Kissinger

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Henry A. Kissinger
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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed.
Henry A. Kissinger
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They [American forces] are there as an expression of the American national interest to prevent the Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology from dominating a region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The important thing is to do the right thing. Then credibility will follow.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?
Henry A. Kissinger
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The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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
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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
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I don't read books, I write them.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.
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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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
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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
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If you mean by military victory an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.
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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Our nation is uniquely endowed to play a creative and decisive role in the new order which is taking form around us.
Henry A. Kissinger
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For any student of history, change is the law of life. Any attempt to contain it guarantees an explosion down the road the more rigid the adherence to the status quo, the more violent the ultimate outcome will be.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
Henry A. Kissinger
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John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.
Henry A. Kissinger
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A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I see the future of China as growth. I think that historically China has often gone through periods of consolidation, and then periods of sort of weakening central authority. They undoubtedly face tremendous challenges.
Henry A. Kissinger