Quotes By Henry A. Kissinger

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

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

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

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

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

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

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

We are all the President's men.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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