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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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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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Administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.
Henry A. Kissinger
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In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.
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Obama is like a chess player who is playing simultaneous chess and has opened his game with an unusual opening.
Henry A. Kissinger
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At any rate, mutually assured destruction was never our policy.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.
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Let us fashion together a new world order.
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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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What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system
Henry A. Kissinger
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People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any form that would require me to stop talking for three hours.
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One theory is that we will make war look so attractive that we undermine the deterrent. That's Never Never Land. What we have now would have been enough to deter Hitler. But we are talking in a different order of reality.
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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Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
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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In the hands of a determined Secretary, the Foreign Service can be a splendid instrument, staffed by knowledgeable, discreet, and energetic individuals. They do require constant vigilance lest the convictions that led them into a penurious career tempt them to preempt decision-making.
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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If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation - and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.
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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World population needs to be decreased by 50%
Henry A. Kissinger
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No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.
Henry A. Kissinger
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The Israelis want security. The Arabs want dignity. And they consider the demands of each other as incompatible.
Henry A. Kissinger