Quotes by Henry Kissinger

• Even a paranoid can have enemies.
• If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.
• In crises the most daring course is often safest.
• If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.
• If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.
• It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.
• 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.
• The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.
• I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
• I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
• It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
• For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.
• 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.
• Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
• Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.
• Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
• High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.
• Power is the great aphrodisiac.
• The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.
• The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
• The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.
• The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
• The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
• The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
• Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
• The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
• Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.
• People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any form that would require me to stop talking for three hours.
• No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.
• Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.
• No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
• Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.
• Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
• The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
• 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.
• While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.
• We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.
• We are all the President's men.
• University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
• Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.
• There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
• You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.
• The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
• The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.
• The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples.
• Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.
• A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.
• A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
• To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.
• Remember, a diamond is a chunk of coal that did well under pressure.
• A diamond is a chunk of coal that did well under pressure.
• A diamond is merely a lump of coal that did well under pressure
• A diamond is coal that did well under pressure.
• A diamond is simply a chunk of coal that did well under pressure.