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Well, he keeps saying that, and as defense secretary, of course he has to think of a lot of potential enemies. I do not think it's a wise course to articulate this or to base our policy on it. And I do not see under modern circumstances what we would be fighting about.

Henry A. Kissinger

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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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In a diplomatic negotiation, you always meet the same the other side all the time. Even if you should succeed in outsmarting him or in pressuring him, it only sets up a cycle in which he will try to get even.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The defining issue is that the government in Taiwan was considered to be the government of all of China, and the authorities in Beijing were not recognized as a government of China. So Taiwan was the residuary for all of China.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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
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No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The nuclear weapons were not useful for the achievement of political objectives.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Before there was the Soviet Union that could inflame matters. Now you have states not as powerful as the Soviet Union, but states like Iraq, like Iran, and to some extent Syria, having made it possible for some of these groups to operate. So it is a very difficult situation.
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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The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Henceforth the adequacy of any military establishment will be tested by its ability to preserve the peace.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Let us fashion together a new world order.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I don't read books, I write them.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The reason prophets are so rarely honored in their own country is that their role is to transcend the limits of their contemporaries' experience and imagination. They achieve recognition only when their vision has been turned into experience - in short, when it is too late to benefit from their foresight.
Henry A. Kissinger
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U.S. policy toward the third world should be one of depopulation
Henry A. Kissinger
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Peace depends ultimately not on political arrangements but on the conscience of mankind.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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