Glory Quotes

Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

Statesman · b. 1923 · 51 quotes

Henry A. Kissinger Quotes About Leadership

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

Henry A. Kissinger Quotes About War

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

More Quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

Henry A. Kissinger

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

Henry A. Kissinger

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

Henry A. Kissinger

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

We are all the President's men.

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

Henry A. Kissinger

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

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

Henry A. Kissinger

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.

Henry A. Kissinger

Browse 51 quotes attributed to Henry A. Kissinger, listed in the source data as a Statesman, organized around themes such as Leadership, War, Responsibility. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.