Quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

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

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

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

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

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

"Power is the great aphrodisiac."

"Diplomacy: the art of restraining power."

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

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

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

"Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative."

"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."

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

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

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

"Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Even a paranoid can have enemies."

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