Quotes from Henry 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.

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

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

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.

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

The tragedy of America is that it entered all the wars with a consensus in favor of them, but within a defined period, the legitimacy of the war became a major domestic issue, with some people arguing that withdrawal was the only legitimate objective.

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction.

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

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

We are moving towards a world that is reordering itself and that may appear more ordered at some periods of time, but I see no sign that we are moving towards a world order in my definition of it - namely, a system which is accepted, which is internalized by the majority of the key participants.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Every first-term president has to learn something after he comes into office. Nobody can be completely ready for the inevitable crises.

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

I don't ascribe to myself any special competence in economic insight. I translate what I hear from highly intelligent people into political and philosophical propositions.

It's never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn't know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.

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

Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven't seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came in to office.

I have not endorsed Trump and will not do so.

I think when the president of the United States calls for military action, he should do it for a united people, especially when the methods have been so cruel, so explicitly directed at Americans.

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

Now when I bore people at a party, they think it's their fault.

My view of my role is that together with like-minded men and women, I could help contribute to a bipartisan view of American engagement in the world for another period; I could do my part to overcome this really, in a way, awful period in which we are turning history into personal recriminations, depriving our political system of a serious debate.

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

Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.