Henry A. Kissinger Quotations

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

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been. The public does not fully understand the world into which it is going. Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision. Those leaders who do not are ultimately judged failures, even though they may be popular at the moment.

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

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

If we do what is necessary, all the odds are in our favor.

Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.

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.

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

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

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

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

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.

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.

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

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.

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

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

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

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

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.

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

Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

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

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.

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

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.

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

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.

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

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

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

We are here because cooperative relations with China are in the American national interest. Every president for 30 years has come to that conclusion, and a rejection of this agreement would be a vote for an adversarial relationship with the most populous nation of China.

We had a very interesting and positive discussion, and I appreciate the opportunity to meet with several of the key staff members of the governor's staff, ... A few weeks ago I stood with the governor when I spoke about present events and nuclear strategy, and my impression is we share very compatible views.

My heart goes out to the president because I've served in an administration that faced a very divided country in a very difficult set of circumstances.

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

Because of the axiom that guerrillas win if they do not lose, stalemate is unacceptable, ... the military challenge in Iraq is more elusive.

For me, the tragedy of Vietnam was the divisions that occurred in the United States that made it, in the end, impossible to achieve an outcome that was compatible with the sacrifices that had been made, ... Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.

Kay ennobled all of her human relationships, ... In the pain of this moment, none of us would trade places with those whose lives were never touched by Kay Graham.

I think the only way to go is to do what they think is the right thing and explain it as well as they can to the American people, as the president is attempting to do with these speeches. The public will not forgive you for losing even if it seems to reflect what they thought they wanted.

It is not unreasonable for us to desire some options. Some Europeans, I know, believe it is necessary that we guarantee our own destruction to give them the assurances they claim they need. However, to deprive ourselves of options is to paralyze us. ... What do we mean by control of escalation?

It is hard to believe that Kay is no longer among us. But in a way, she will never leave us. Her place in this country will not be filled, nor the void her death leaves on the lives of her friends,

We'll do it in the quickest way possible that is compatible with foreigners and making sure that when the report is finished, there can be no question about the fact that every aspect has been explored, ... Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer.

We will go where the facts lead us,

Congress can't do much more damage to us than they already have. To this extent we're liberated to do what is right. ... Our successors will be living in a nightmare if we don't do what is right.

an occasion to blow off their frustrations on an issue on which they didn't look as if they are begging (the United States) for help.

a review of withdrawal strategy ... seems in order.

I want to get into the President's head some idea of what he can do. If military actions are recommended to him for decision, I want him to know what he is doing when he decides.

I'm confident John Bolton will bring peace to the world before he brings peace to his relations with The New York Times,

if East Pakistan becomes independent, it is going to become a cesspool. It's going to be 100 million people; they have the lowest standard of living in Asia. They are going to become a ripe field for communist infiltration.

I believe -- and certainly from everything I've been told about him -- that he's an honorable enough man so that he will carry out his assignment with ability and with care.

I don't consider China a communist state, no. I know that sounds paradoxical, but it's my view.

The defining issue is that the government in Taiwan was considered to be the government of all of China, and the authorities in Beijing were not recognized as a government of China. So Taiwan was the residuary for all of China.

Certainly not a party of the workers and the peasants. In fact, Jiang Zemin in recent weeks has officially said that capitalists and the entrepreneurs should be enrolled in the Communist Party.

People are now starting to explain the Cold War. Even in the crises at that time the survival of millions of people was at stake. And we (the USA) had to threaten the other super power with retaliation to prevent it from doing something to us. Today we live in a world in which a lot of things are in flux. That creates a lot of fear. But it is also a time of great opportunity. And I would call on today's statesmen to not allow their thinking to be directed by fear.

In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.

I wouldn't say it's a split. It's a difference of emphasis. It does exist between, I would say, the State Department and the Defense Department.

What is applicable is to understand that first of all China has undergone a huge revolution in the last years. Anyone who saw China as I did in 1971 - and for that matter even in 1979, because not much had changed between 1971 and 1979 - and sees China today, knows one is in a different economic system.

When I first saw China, there were no automobiles. There were no supermarkets. There were no high-rise buildings. There were no consumer goods. There were no restaurants that were at least accessible that foreigners could see. It was a Stalinist society, and a very poor Stalinist society. So the economic system has totally changed, and the private sector in the economic system is now the dominant sector. It didn't exist at all as late as 1979.

The China of the 1970s was a communist dictatorship. The China of the twenty-first century is a one-party state without a firm ideological foundation, more similar to Mexico under the PRI than Russia under Stalin. But the measurement of the political and the economic evolution has not yet been completed, and is one of the weak points of the system.

America has made it very clear in several administrations that if there is an attack by China on Taiwan, the United States is very likely to resist.

Well it did not make excessive sense to say that 20 million people are the recognized government of a billion people that have their own institutions. We did not change it in the sense that we said this has to end, but there was a U.N. vote that transferred the legitimacy of China from Taiwan to Beijing. Beijing was recognized as the government of all of China. Then, under President Carter, we followed what the U.N. had already done eight years earlier.

I have great respect for the Taiwanese. They have done an extraordinary job. But it was not a sustainable position to say that the legitimate government of China resides in Taiwan, which at that time didn't have much contact with the mainland.

Well, I don't know whether it caused anguish in China, but it was not a wise way to proceed. But one has to remember that it was the first experience. And in a Republican administration, there is a conservative wing that looks at China as the last embodiment of communism, which therefore tends towards a more bellicose rhetoric anyway than I would. It's not the dominant element, but every once in a while they get a crack at public statement.

I had an opportunity to express my views, yes. I agreed with the approach which we took, namely, to make a distinction between the loss of life of the Chinese pilot and our military operations outside territorial waters or territorial limits.

We first became conscious of the plane publicly on a Monday. I thought then by the weekend it would be done. But then the Chinese military, the defense minister made a statement saying that if there was no apology from the United States, the Chinese military and the Chinese people would never understand. No reference to the government or the Communist Party, and that obviously presented an internal problem to the Chinese leadership, which was travelling at that moment.

The American formal position has been that we oppose violence by governments against their people. That principle should not be abandoned.

I do not criticize people who take a public stand on human rights issues. I express my respect for them. But some people are more influential without a public confrontation.

American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.

Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states.

China is a one party state. Sooner or later China will get to the point when the new social classes, which have emerged thanks to economic success, will have to be integrated into the political system. There is no guarantee that this process will run smoothly.

I am against portraying China as the demon of the global community. China has grasped more quickly than other countries what globalization means and what it demands. The country has learned how to use other people's innovations for itself. India, incidentally, is not far behind China in this respect. Both are not nations in the European sense, but rather cultural communities with enormous markets. The challenge of the future is to work out how to deal with that.

Well, on the American side, every new administration has to cut its teeth in a crisis, because before a crisis, you don't really know what your various subordinates are thinking under stress.

The first reactions are often instinctive. So one of the first things we said was that the Chinese had no right to inspect the plane, and that we had a sovereign right to. I don't know what the legal position is, but it was surely psychologically absolutely the unwise thing to do.

The Chinese, on the other hand, were in the position of having an American military spy plane on a Chinese military base and they had their own internal problems to deal with. At first, the Chinese weren't all that belligerent. They were just stalling to get their own bureaucracy in line.

If a Chinese plane landed at Los Angeles Airport having just bought down an American military plane, he wouldn't be permitted to leave the next day. So then we developed a framework which should have been acceptable as a concept to the Chinese, namely to express regret for the loss of life and maintain our position that we had a right to fly these missions.

Certainly nothing is easier than to rewrite history. If we had made Taiwan a separate state, it would have led to a fundamental conflict with China, and probably to war. Certainly in the long term, it would have led to war.

In the short term, it would not have made it possible to resume relations, because in the Chinese mind, the humiliation of China started with the annexation of Taiwan by Japan. If the United States had suddenly declared Taiwan as a separate state - for which we would have had no support among other nations - the consequences would have been giving up our relationship with China and committing ourselves to a long-term conflict with China.

Every time there has been an attempt to disturb it, it led to two things. It led to immediate intense conflict with China, and it led to a reaffirmation in the end, because nobody wanted a major confrontation with China to this principle of a "one China" policy within which Taiwan is finding a place now. Its own position has greatly improved since the Nixon policy. It is richer, it is stronger and it is participating in many international organizations.

I see the future of China as growth. I think that historically China has often gone through periods of consolidation, and then periods of sort of weakening central authority. They undoubtedly face tremendous challenges.

You know, this is a very strange phenomenon. I keep reading that in American newspapers, and I keep reading extensive speculations. I meet with the Chinese leaders periodically, and while I don't say they've endorsed the missile shield, it has not been in the forefront of their discussions.

More and more of the Taiwanese economy is connected with the mainland. There are more and more exchanges taking place. There's no reason to doubt that over a period of ten years or so, or maybe more, the conditions of life on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait will become more comparable, and the dialogue on the political level therefore easier.

I don't think we should pay people to fight terrorism. I would be amazed if they asked for anything in return.

I think China will do nothing to obstruct it, and they probably will go along with it.

I don't think that that's a desirable option for us. Besides, it wouldn't work, because there are too many other countries that are willing to work economically with China. But I don't think the basic relationship depends on economics. It depends on a political understanding of what is required for peace in Asia.

Like any developing country, it has an inequality of wealth. In the Chinese case, it is particularly [pronounced] by the fact that they decided they couldn't make the whole country move forward simultaneously, so they've started region by region. So the interior regions are much less well off than the coastal regions. And this is certainly a huge challenge, because it produces a flow of populations from the poorer regions to the richer regions.

China has had a long and complex history and has managed to evolve its own culture for 4,000 years. It therefore not necessarily true that we know exactly what is best for the internal structure of China.