Quotes from Henry Kissinger

postcolonial" countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial

Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy.

Chess teaches the Clausewitzian concepts of "center of gravity" and the "decisive point"—the game usually beginning as a struggle for the center of the board. Wei qi teaches the art of strategic encirclement.

Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.

But Japan drew from the challenge the opposite conclusion as China: it threw open its doors to foreign technology and overhauled its institutions in an attempt to replicate the Western powers' rise.

New methods of accessing and communicating information unite regions as never before and project events globally—but in a manner that inhibits reflection, demanding of leaders that they register instantaneous reactions in a form expressible in slogans. Are we facing a period in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future?

In any of these evolutions, India will be a fulcrum of twenty-first-century order: an indispensable element, based on its geography, resources, and tradition of sophisticated leadership, in the strategic and ideological evolution of the regions and the concepts of order at whose intersection it stands.

Anyone wishing to affect events must be opportunist to some extent. The real dis­tinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.

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

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.

in international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.

The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat.

A Harvard study has shown that in fifteen cases in history where a rising and an established power interacted, ten ended in war.

For Roosevelt, if a nation was unable or unwilling to act to defend its own interests, it could not expect others to respect them. Inevitably

order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace.

If the gap between the qualities required for election and those essential for the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and sense of history that should be part of foreign policy may be lost—or else the cultivation of these qualities may take so much of a president's first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for the United States.

The highest form of warfare Is to attack [the enemy's] Strategy itself; The next, To attack [his] Alliances. The next, To attack Armies;

Yet a surfeit of information may paradoxically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and push wisdom even further away than it was before. 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?

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

It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.

The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive.

Who controls money control the world.

When the Chinese court deigned to send envoys abroad, they were not diplomats, but "Heavenly Envoys" from the Celestial Court.

The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily.