Quotes By Henry A. Kissinger

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.

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

We are all the President's men.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.