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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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Henry A. Kissinger
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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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The nuclear weapons were not useful for the achievement of political objectives.
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I think that his [Obama's] task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period, when really a New World Order can be created.
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American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.
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In my view, there's no doubt that the Soviets had infinitely greater trouble holding their structure together than we did.
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 illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
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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With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears.
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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In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Nixon had three goals: to win by the biggest electoral landslide in history to be remembered as a peacemaker and to be accepted by the 'Establishment' as an equal. He achieved all these objectives at the end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973. And he lost them all two months later-partly because he turned a dream into an obsession.
Henry A. Kissinger
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You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.
Henry A. Kissinger
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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
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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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The Gorbachev period is conceived as an abandonment of historic Russian positions. So this is the framework, in my view, in which Putin operates.
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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The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
Henry A. Kissinger
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Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The British capitalize on their accent when they don't want you to know what they're saying. But if you wake them up at 4 A.M., they speak perfect English, the same as we do.
Henry A. Kissinger