Explore Quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.

History knows no resting places and no plateaus

History is the memory of States.

Our greatest foreign policy problem is our divisions at home. Our greatest foreign policy need is national cohesion and a return to the awareness that in foreign policy we are all engaged in a common national endeavor.

This country cannot afford to tear itself apart on a partisan basis on issues so vital to our national security.

Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government

Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries

World population needs to be decreased by 50%

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.

They [American forces] are there as an expression of the American national interest to prevent the Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology from dominating a region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend.

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

We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.

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

People think responsibility is hard to bear. It's not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.

Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.

We are all the President's men.

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

We are not just any nation.

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.