Quotes from Henry Kissinger

yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace.

Mao thought he was inscrutable you know. At least I think he did. it was hard to tell with him.

The Commander of U.S. Cyber Command has predicted that "the next war will begin in cyberspace." It will not be possible to conceive of international order when the region through which states' survival and progress are taking place remains without any international standards of conduct and is left to unilateral decisions.

The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century's decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.

Who controls the money controls the world

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

American exceptionalism is missionary. It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world. China's exceptionalism is cultural.

In the vacuum of authority following the demonstrations' initial success, factions from the pre-uprising period are often in a position to shape the outcome.

Created by humans, AI should be overseen by humans. But in our time, one of AI's challenges is that the skills and resources required to create it are not inevitably paired with the philosophical perspective to understand its broader implications.

Moreover, events often move too quickly to allow for precise calculation; leaders have to make judgments based on intuitions and hypotheses that cannot be proven at the time of decision. Management of risk is as critical to the leader as analytical skill.

The penalty for excessive ambition – what the Greeks called hubris – is exhaustion, while the price for resting on one's laurels is progressive insignificance and eventual decay.

Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.

As Charles de Gaulle observed in his meditation on leadership, The Edge of the Sword (1932), the artist 'does not renounce the use of his intelligence' – which is, after all, the source of 'lessons, methods, and knowledge'. Instead, the artist adds to these foundations 'a certain instinctive faculty which we call inspiration', which alone can provide the 'direct contact with nature from which the vital spark must leap'.

The lowest form of war is To attack Cities. Siege warfare Is a last resort . . .   The Skillful Strategist Defeats the enemy Without doing battle, Captures the city Without laying siege, Overthrows the enemy state Without protracted war.34

The scientist thus learns truth experimentally or mathematically; the strategist reasons at least partly by analogy with the past – first establishing which events are comparable and which prior conclusions remain relevant.

Constantly changing shape as its rulers annexed contiguous territories, Russia was an empire out of scale in comparison with any of the European countries. Moreover, with every new conquest, the character of the state changed as it incorporated another brand-new, restive, non-Russian ethnic group. This was one of the reasons Russia felt obliged to maintain huge armies whose size was unrelated to any plausible threat to its external security.

Because in this view the domestic principles of an Islamic state were divinely ordained, non-Muslim political entities were illegitimate; they could never be accepted by Muslim states as truly equal counterparts. A peaceful world order depended on the ability to forge and expand a unitary Islamic entity, not on an equilibrium of competing parts.

Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. they may deviate from the previous trajectory only within a finite margin. the great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. if they fall short, society stagnates. if they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity.

I want to express here my continuing respect and personal affection for President George W. Bush, who guided America with courage, dignity, and conviction in an unsteady time. His objectives and dedication honored his country even when in some cases they proved unattainable within the American political cycle.

The irony is that even as digitization is making an increasing amount of information available, it is diminishing the space required for deep, concentrated thought.

may not lead to reduction in U.S. casualties until its final stages, as our casualty rate may be unrelated to the total number of American troops in South Vietnam. To kill about 150 U.S. soldiers a week, the enemy needs to attack only a small portion of our forces….

The United States has every reason from history and geopolitics to bolster the European Union and prevent its drifting off into a geopolitical vacuum; the United States, if separated from Europe in politics, economics, and defense, would become geopolitically an island off the shores of Eurasia, and Europe itself could turn into an appendage to the reaches of Asia and the Middle East.

Its requirement of frequent daily prayers made faith a way of life; its emphasis on the identity of religious and political power transformed the expansion of Islam from an imperial enterprise into a sacred obligation.

ALL TWELVE POSTWAR presidents have passionately affirmed an exceptional role for America in the world.