Henry Kissinger's Quotes

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

Henry Kissinger

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Henry Kissinger

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.

Henry Kissinger

Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven't seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came in to office.

Henry Kissinger

The attitude of the West and of Russia towards a crisis like Ukraine is diametrically different. The West is trying to establish the legality of any established border. For Russia, Ukraine is part of the Russian patrimony.

Henry Kissinger

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.

Henry Kissinger

The Vietnam War was a great tragedy for our country. And it is now far enough away so that one can study without using the slogans to see what's really happened.

Henry Kissinger

My view of my role is that together with like-minded men and women, I could help contribute to a bipartisan view of American engagement in the world for another period; I could do my part to overcome this really, in a way, awful period in which we are turning history into personal recriminations, depriving our political system of a serious debate.

Henry Kissinger

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Henry Kissinger

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing.

Henry Kissinger

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

Henry Kissinger

A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.

Henry Kissinger

It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

Henry Kissinger

Leadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelt's time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, it's different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.

Henry Kissinger

I don't see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.

Henry Kissinger

You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.

Henry Kissinger

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

Henry Kissinger

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Henry Kissinger

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

Henry Kissinger

I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

Henry Kissinger

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

Henry Kissinger

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 Kissinger

Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.

Henry Kissinger