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51 Most Powerful Quotes from Henry A. Kissinger

Henry Kissinger was Born on May 27, 1923, in Fürth, Germany. His family was german Jews. In 1938, at the age of 15, while the Nazis were tightening their grip on power, the Kissinger family immigrated to New York. Landing in the United States without any fortune and money and being completely poor, the young Kissinger went to work in order to make ends meet for his family.

Kissinger went on to learn English at night at the George Washington High School. In 1943, he became a U.S. citizen. He pursued his further studies at Harvard in political science in 1950; and obtained his Master in 1951 and PhD in 1954 at Harvard University. After his studies, he became an instructor for government and foreign policy studies and was promoted as director of Defense Studies program. He was an acute observer of the political landscape with an eye and understanding for strategic policy.

The life of Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger went on to play some important roles in the political landscape of the U.S: He became an advisor for the Department of State, and in 1968 he became the National Security Advisor of Richard Nixon, from 1969 to 1977. Furthermore, he was elected as Secretary of State under Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Kissinger’s policies in the Vietnam War, although he landed a cease-fire, the U.S. military Coup in Chile and his support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh War, despite the genocide, and his role in the secret bombing of Cambodia, made him quite a controversial figure.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace together with Le Duc Tho, who refused to accept the honour. Many critics raised their voice at Kissinger’s nomination. For some he’s considered a war criminal, while for others he’s regarded as one of the best Secretary of State in the history of the United States.

Since his retirement from active political life, Henry Kissinger has founded the consultancy firm Kissinger Associates specializing in international relations and he has written extensively about politics and the New World Order.

Henry Kissinger Quotes

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

Henry A. Kissinger

If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.

Henry A. Kissinger

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

Henry A. Kissinger

If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.

Henry A. Kissinger

If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

Henry A. 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 A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

Henry A. Kissinger

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

Henry A. Kissinger

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

Henry A. Kissinger

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

Henry A. Kissinger

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

Henry A. Kissinger

The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

Henry A. Kissinger

Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

Henry A. Kissinger

People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any form that would require me to stop talking for three hours.

Henry A. Kissinger

No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

Henry A. Kissinger

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

Henry A. Kissinger

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

Henry A. Kissinger

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

Henry A. 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 A. Kissinger

We are all the President’s men.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

The statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between his nation’s experience and his vision.

Henry A. Kissinger

The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples.

Henry A. Kissinger

Accept everything about yourself – I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end – no apologies, no regrets.

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

Henry A. Kissinger

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