Famous Quotes

Quotes by Henry A Kissinger

• A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
• 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.
• Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.
• Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
• Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.
• Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
• It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.
• It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
• Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
• Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.
• Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.
• Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
• 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.
• People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any form that would require me to stop talking for three hours.
• Power is the great aphrodisiac.
• The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.
• The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
• 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.
• There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
• University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
• 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.
• You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.