Quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

"Even a paranoid can have enemies."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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