Quotes By Henry A. Kissinger

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

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.