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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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Henry A. Kissinger
Absolute
Alibi
Begins
Establishing
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Dissatisfaction
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Balanced
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Test
Policy
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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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I think an appeal to American idealism and willingness to sacrifice would be an important contribution, because what is happening now in many countries, not yet in the United States, but in many European countries, it's the inability of government to ask for sacrifices of its people.
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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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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If we do what is necessary, all the odds are in our favor.
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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What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system
Henry A. Kissinger
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University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
Henry A. Kissinger
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I know Hillary Clinton as a person. And as a personal friend, I would say yes, she'd be a good president. But she'd put me under a great conflict of interest if she were a candidate because I intend to support the Republicans.
Henry A. Kissinger
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There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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
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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.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs.
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 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
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An Iranian moderate is one who has run out of ammunition.
Henry A. Kissinger
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In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.
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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If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere
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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This is awful. Do it again.
Henry A. Kissinger