Quotes from Henry Kissinger

To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires character and courage: character because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first.

World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable to the entire world.

The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of all books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking—the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future.

when Germany declared itself ready to discuss an armistice, Wilson refused to negotiate until the Kaiser abdicated.

If the major powers come to practice foreign policies of manipulating a multiplicity of subsovereign units observing ambiguous and often violent rules of conduct, many based on extreme articulations of divergent cultural experiences, anarchy is certain.

The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other's domestic affairs and checking each other's ambitions through a general equilibrium of power.

So long as strategic nuclear weapons were the principal element of Europe's defense, the objective of European policy was primarily psychological: to oblige the United States to treat Europe as an extension of itself in case of an emergency.

The essence of building a constructive world order is that no single country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in the immediate post–Cold War period, when it was materially and psychologically preeminent.

Because the unchecked eastward advance into Manchuria and Korea of Russia—a country that, in Roosevelt's words, "pursued a policy of consistent opposition to us in the East, and of literally fathomless mendacity"—

Well, you can just stop and think of what could happen if anybody with a decent system of government got control of that mainland. Good God.… There'd be no power in the world that could even—I mean, you put 800 million Chinese to work under a decent system… and they will be the leaders of the world.34

Torn between obsessive insecurity and proselytizing zeal, between the requirements of Europe and the temptations of Asia, the Russian Empire always had a role in the European equilibrium but was never emotionally a part of it.

Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told Ambassador Robert Murphy, a Dulles emissary, that, if Great Britain did not confront Nasser now, "Britain would become another Netherlands.

To me there is not only right or wrong but many shades in between...The real tragedies in life are not in choices between right and wrong. Only the most callous of persons choose what they know to be wrong. Real tragedy comes [illegible] in a dilemma of evaluating what is right...Real dilemmas are difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you in your world of black and white can't even begin to comprehend.

framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent. Can today's leaders rise above the urgency of day-to-day events to achieve this balance?

Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering

Spanish territory in Florida and Texas—the

For nearly twenty years, Bismarck preserved the peace and eased international tension with his moderation and flexibility. But he paid the price of misunderstood greatness, for his successors and would-be imitators could draw no better lesson from his example than multiplying arms and waging a war which would cause the suicide of European civilization.

Religion and politics never merged into a single construct, leading to Voltaire's truthful jest that the Holy Roman Empire was "neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

Cold War. China, though technically an ally of the Soviet Union, was in quest of maneuvering

Later I learned to improve my forecasting—if necessary by asking the visitor in advance what subjects he intended to raise with Nixon. In

the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office. There is little time for leaders to reflect. They are locked in an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important. The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance. When

If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint.

China produced no religious themes in the Western sense at all. The Chinese never generated a myth of cosmic creation.

Yet after withdrawing from three wars in two generations—each begun with idealistic aspirations and widespread public support but ending in national trauma—America struggles to define the relationship between its power (still vast) and its principles.