Henry A. Kissinger quotes:

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

A return to the 1967 lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival.

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

We have three things in common: Irish wives, the ability to speak for 17 minutes without a verb, and the fact that we both speak with an accent.

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

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

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

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

Henceforth the adequacy of any military establishment will be tested by its ability to preserve the peace.

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

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

We are all the President's men.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.

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

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

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.

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

I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power.

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.

In the middle '50s, I had written that the point would come, inevitably, at which the relationship between the cause of conflict and political objectives would be lost.

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

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.

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

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

U.S. policy toward the third world should be one of depopulation

There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane: Either you have diarrhea, or you're anxious to meet people who do.

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

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

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

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

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

President Nixon in his inaugural address indicated that he wanted an era of negotiation. Our reasoning was that whatever our ideological differences, whatever our geopolitical differences, we were condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons.

An Iranian moderate is one who has run out of ammunition.

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.

John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.

Nixon had three goals: to win by the biggest electoral landslide in history; to be remembered as a peacemaker; and to be accepted by the 'Establishment' as an equal. He achieved all these objectives at the end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973. And he lost them all two months later-partly because he turned a dream into an obsession.

It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.

We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.

At any rate, mutually assured destruction was never our policy.

NAFTA is a major stepping stone to the New World Order.

NAFTA represents the single most creative step towards a New World Order.

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.

My country's history, Mr. President, tells us that it is possible to fashion unity while cherishing diversity, that common action is possible despite the variety of races, interests, and beliefs we see here in this chamber. Progress and peace and justice are attainable. So we say to all peoples and governments: Let us fashion together a new world order.

Let us fashion together a new world order.

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

In a nuclear war, even if one side were to come out ahead by systems analytical standards, both sides would be so weakened, that it would - they would be in the position of Europe after the two World Wars.

The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.

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

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

Even paranoid people have enemies.

Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.

History knows no resting places and no plateaus

Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?

In the current [Carter] administration, who can use the White House swimming pool and tennis courts is decided at the very highest level. President Ford did not bother himself with such minor details. He let me swim in the pool. He only got upset when I tried to walk across the water.

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.

I have said there are three principles that should be followed. One, we should maintain the "one China" policy that every American president has articulated, including President Reagan. Secondly, we should make clear that we want a peaceful resolution. And three, Taiwan should not challenge that arrangement in a way that will provoke a conflict. Those are three perfectly clear principles. I haven't used any of the other slogans.

I think a resumption of the Cold War would be a historic tragedy. If a conflict is avoidable, on a basis reflecting morality and security, one should try to avoid it.

Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something. The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault.

The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.

Far too often, the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side's outpost against the other - it should function as a bridge between them.

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.

Diplomats operate through deadlock, which is the way by which two sides can test each other's determination. Even if they have egos for it few heads of government have the time to resolve stalemates, their meetings are too short and the demands of protocol too heavy.

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.

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.

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.

I can think of no faster way to unite the American people behind George W. Bush than a terrorist attack on an American target overseas. And I believe George W. Bush will quickly unite the American people through his foreign policy.

No, [the U.S.] has made it clear that we consider a peaceful resolution an essential aspect of American foreign policy. This I believe to be a situation understood by China, but again, it is important to not sound too truculent. Taking on a billion-plus Chinese is not an enterprise which one should enter lightly.

Tutelage is a comfortable relationship for the senior partner, but it is demoralizing in the long run. It breeds illusions of omniscience on one side and attitudes of impotent irresponsibility on the other.

A diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure.

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.

Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.

We believe that peace is at hand.

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

I would have said, before the World Trade Center events, that he would try to get a normal relationship with China - making clear to China what the limits are of what America can accept, but also showing understanding for some of Chinese necessities. I thought he was moving towards the position that I have more or less advocated.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

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

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

[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia . He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.

[The New World Order] cannot happen without U.S. participation, as we are the most significant single component. Yes, there will be a New World Order, and it will force the United States to change it's perceptions.

90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad name.

A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.

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

A little uncertainty is good for everyone.

A nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions.

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

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.

Almost every peace process that has gone on between the Arab side and Israel, the United States has been somewhat isolated because most of the countries in the world, what they really want is to accept the Arab peace plan or so-called peace plan, which in its present form would lead to the destruction of Israel.

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.

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests

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

Americans believe that you can alter people by conversion, and that everybody in the world is a potential American. The Chinese also believe that their values are universal, but they do not believe that you can convert to becoming a Chinese unless you are born into it.

An expert is someone who articulates the needs of those in power.

Any international system must have two key elements for it to work. One, it has to have a certain equilibrium of power that makes overthrowing the system difficult and costly. Secondly, it has to have a sense of legitimacy.