Quotes About Kissinger

Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

Historians will look back and say, 'Foreign policy in the Ford presidency was very much dominated by Kissinger, with a kind of continuity from the Nixon period.' Ford is not going to be remembered as a really significant foreign policy maker.

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.

K [Kissinger] called from New York all disturbed because he felt someone had been getting to the P [President] on Vietnam... Henry's concerned that the P's looking for a way to bug out and he thinks that would be a disaster now.

I happen to write a lot of stories that make Kissinger look bad. I'd rather that the stories weren't true, but they all happen to be true.

I was fourteen when Kissinger made his secret trip to China, and then there was subsequently Nixon's trip to China, and I was very much seized with an interest in China.

Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today, with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars.

Generally it must be stated that realpolitik has been better at dividing than at ruling. Take it as a whole since Kissinger called on the Shah in 1972, and see what the harvest has been.

Most students of Kissinger find it hard to say anything about Kissinger that isn't about the man himself. He is such an outsize figure that he eclipses his own context, leading his many biographers, critics, and admirers to focus nearly exclusively on the quirks of his personality or his moral failings.

Nixon did not anticipate the extent to which Kissinger, whom he barely knew when he appointed him national-security adviser in 1969, would be envious and high-strung - a maintenance project of the first order.

undertaken with explicit directives reaching to such levels of criminality that they defy words, such as the infamous orders that Kissinger obediently transmitted to the US Air Force calling for "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves" (Becker)—a call for genocide that is hard to duplicate in the historical record.

Kissinger celebrants inevitably point to two things to justify their admiration: an opening to China - 'rapprochement' - and improved relations with the Soviet Union - detente - which included SALT, a historic arms-limitation treaty.

Similar questions were posed to Allende as to me. Allende was told that he blamed everything on a conspiracy, on the economic crisis, that he blamed the high inflation that sabotaged him on the United States, and that he was frequently accusing the little lambs of Nixon and Kissinger of a coup. But everything became known later.

Kissinger's 1960 recipe for success was to combine massive increases in US foreign aid with assistance in constructing "enlightened political institutions" in the recipient countries. Noting that "economic assistance is a form of intervention," Kissinger believed that "to offer nothing but bread is to leave the arena to those who are sufficiently dynamic to define their purpose."39

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been the chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, and Kissinger: A Biography, and is the coauthor, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He and his wife live in Washington

Kissinger would probably be outraged even if he reread his own memoirs, on the grounds that they are not favorable enough.

Man's knowledge of freedom, Kissinger argued, must come from an inner intuition.

Bismarck urged that foreign policy had to be based not on sentiment but on an assessment of strength," Kissinger wrote. That would also become one of Kissinger's guiding principles.

Moreover, Kissinger and Nixon deeply distrusted each other. Kissinger was sometimes contemptuous (behind Nixon's back) of the President. He called Nixon our drunken friend, a basket case, or meatball mind. Kissinger was also given to fits of temper. After one of these tantrums Nixon confided that he might have to fire Kissinger unless he got psychological help.

Kissinger would select suspects for surveillance. If Hoover concurred, the taps would go in. The responsibility for finding the leakers and stopping the leaks would rest entirely on the FBI. On

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

Durante los debates parlamentarios de noviembre de 1949, recalcó esto al gritar (algo muy poco habitual en él):

In his essay, 'Perpetual Peace,' the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.

Kissinger's unusually high body count and singular moral imperiousness has the effect, among his critics, of obscuring his didactic utility. An outsized personality who has committed outsized mayhem, Kissinger eclipses his own context. Yet, as animals were to the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Kissinger is good to think with.