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. And the statesman must then inspire his people to persist in the endeavor.

History is the memory of States.

I want to thank you for stopping the applause. It is impossible for me to look humble for any period of time.

Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool.

power without legitimacy tempts tests of strength; legitimacy without power tepmts empty posturing.

History knows no resting places and no plateaus

If Tehran insists on combining the Persian imperial tradition with contemporary Islamic fervor, then a collision with America — and, indeed, with its negotiating partners of the Six — is unavoidable. Iran simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region of such importance to the rest of the world.

A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck's nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: "We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.

Politicians are like dogs... Their life expectancy is too short for a commitment to be bearable

Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.

history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable situations.

Realpolitik for Bismarck depended on flexibility and on the ability to exploit every available option without the constraint of ideology.

If Chinese exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire, Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it.

The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his "Choruses from 'The Rock'": Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

What distinguishes Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military.

The Soviet Union would never be bound by agreements, Deng warned; it understood only the language of countervailing force.

When statesmen want to gain time, they offer to talk.

in effect, none of the most important countries which must build a new world order have had any experience with the multistate system that is emerging. Never before has a new world order had to be assembled from so many different perceptions, or on so global a scale.

If chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign. The chess player aims for total victory. The wei qi player seeks relative advantage.

It is . . . a melancholy fact that the countries which are most humanitarian, which are most interested in internal improvement, tend to grow weaker compared with the other countries which possess a less altruistic civilization . . 

United States would become the indispensable defender of the order Europe designed.

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, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union.

For the greatest part of humanity and the longest periods of history, empire has been the typical mode of government.

And history teaches this iron law of revolutions: the more extensive the eradication of existing authority, the more its successors must rely on naked power to establish themselves. For,in the end,legitimacy involves an acceptance of authority without compulsion; its absence turns every contest into a test of strength.