Henry A. Kissinger

Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, or aspirations that weren’t realized. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.

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

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

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.

What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.

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.

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.

In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.

Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.

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

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

A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

Administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.

Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.

It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.

China had never had to deal in a world of countries of approximately equal strength, and so to adjust to such a world, is in itself a profound challenge to China, which now has fourteen countries on its borders, some of which are small, but can project their nationality into China, some of which are large, and historically significant, so that any attempt by Chinese to dominate the world, would involve in a disastrous for the peace of the world.

Create the impression of endless willingness to compromise and you almost invite deadlines. That's the challenge we now have in North Korea and have had in North Korea for 10 years. In this sense, diplomacy and foreign policy and other elements of political activity have to be closely linked and have to be understood by the negotiators

China is a country with a record of continuous self-government going back 4,000 years, the only society that has achieved this. One must start with the assumption that they must have learnt something about the requirements for survival, and it is not always to be assumed that we know it better than they do.

One theory is that we will make war look so attractive that we undermine the deterrent. That's Never Never Land. What we have now would have been enough to deter Hitler. But we are talking in a different order of reality.