Quotes from Henry Kissinger

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

Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power and is often, in point of fact, useless. Just as a leader doesn't need intelligence, a man in my job doesn't need too much of it either.

I do not stand on protocol. If you just call me Excellency, it will be okay.

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, who he assumes to have perfect vision.

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

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

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

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

I have spoken to Chinese leaders occasionally on human rights, but I've always done it in private.

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 essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

I think that America's recovery of a global strategic view is an absolutely essential element of our foreign policy.

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

Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

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

People think responsibility is hard to bear. It's not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.

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

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.

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

Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy.

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There's too much fraternizing with the enemy.

Every success is usually an admission ticket to a new set of decisions.

High office teaches decision-making, not substance…. A period in high office consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it.