Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears.

We are doomed to coexist.

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.

Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided; more often it is a crisis invited.

Iraq has to be made an international, and not just a national American problem.

I do not believe that Putin intends to leave office in a Cold War atmosphere with the United States.

The Russian people, at least the ones I know, have pride in being a Russian. And, therefore, they want to be taken seriously in international affairs.

The Gorbachev period is conceived as an abandonment of historic Russian positions. So this is the framework, in my view, in which Putin operates.

You're 18 points down [in the polls]... You might as well do what's right.

The American formal position has been that we oppose violence by governments against their people. That principle should not be abandoned.

I go out with actresses because I'm not apt to marry one.

We are all the President's men.

In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.

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.

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.

I think China will do nothing to obstruct it, and they probably will go along with it.

He [Deng Xiaoping] said that he did not understand why we failed to grasp that the alternative was not democracy, but total chaos and risking all the reforms that had been achieved.

The position is that stability and peace in Asia depend on a cooperative relationship between China and the United States.

One thing I don't want around me is a military intellectual. I don't have to worry about you on that score.

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

Every American president, regardless of party, has said that America has an intense interest in a peaceful resolution. And I think it should be left at that.

Many of the scientists have believed that their contribution to ending the nuclear race is not to let any new weapons to be developed.

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.

Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?

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

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

The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.

We are not just any nation.