Quotes By Henry A. Kissinger

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

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

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

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

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

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

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

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

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

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

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

We are all the President's men.

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