Henry Kissinger quotes - page 2

Over time even two armed blind men in a room can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room. (Henry Kissinger)
America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests. View quote
Henry Kissinger
Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people. View quote
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. View quote
Henry Kissinger
[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. View quote
Henry Kissinger
If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere. View quote
Henry Kissinger
To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it. View quote
Henry Kissinger
The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. View quote
Henry Kissinger
In crises the most daring course is often safest. View quote
Henry Kissinger
The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself. View quote
Henry Kissinger
Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government. (Henry Kissinger)
Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself. View quote
Henry Kissinger
The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes. View quote
Henry Kissinger
The issues are too important to be left for the voters. View quote
Henry Kissinger
Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system. Empires have no need for a balance of power. That is how the United States has conducted its foreign policy in the Americas, and China through most of its history in Asia. View quote
Henry Kissinger
I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. View quote
Henry Kissinger
It is a mistake to assume that diplomacy can always settle international disputes if there is "good faith" and "willingness to come to an agreement". For in a revolutionary international order, each power will seem to its opponents to lack precisely these qualities. [...] In the absence of an agreement on what constitutes a reasonable demand, diplomatic conferences are occupied with sterile repetitions of basic positions and accusations of bad faith, or allegations of "unreasonableness" and "subversion". They become elaborate stage plays which attempt to attach as yet uncommitted powers to one of the opposing systems. View quote
Henry Kissinger
Wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States. View quote
Henry Kissinger
... the most fundamental problem of politics, which is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness. View quote
Henry Kissinger
Here, according to the mythology of the liberals, was a peaceful little country that Nixon attacked. The fact that there were four North Vietnamese divisions within 30 miles of Saigon coming across the border killing Americans-killing 500 a week starting within two weeks of Nixon's inauguration-was ignored in the debate on Cambodia by protesters emphasizing the technical neutrality of Cambodia and ignoring that its ruler had invited our response. View quote
Henry Kissinger
In the 1950s and 1960s we put several thousand nuclear weapons into Europe. To be sure, we had no precise idea of what to do with them. (Henry Kissinger)
The accumulation of nuclear arms has to be constrained if mankind is not to destroy itself. View quote
Henry Kissinger
We are the ones who have been operating against our public opinion, against our bureaucracy, at the very edge of legality. View quote
Henry Kissinger
If the President had his way, we'd have a nuclear war every week. View quote
Henry Kissinger
The world's democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values. A global retreat from balancing power with legitimacy will cause the social contract to disintegrate both domestically and internationally. View quote
Henry Kissinger