Quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

Education

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Love

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

Wisdom

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Success

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom

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

— Henry A. Kissinger

Wisdom