Henry Kissinger quotes

The task of the leader is to get their people from where they are to where they have not been.
- Henry Kissinger

There cannot be a stressful crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
- Henry Kissinger

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
- Henry Kissinger

Even a paranoid can have enemies.
- Henry Kissinger

If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.
- Henry Kissinger

In crises the most daring course is often safest.
- Henry Kissinger

If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.
- Henry Kissinger

If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.
- Henry Kissinger

It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.
- Henry Kissinger

If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation – and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.
- Henry Kissinger

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.
- Henry Kissinger

I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
- Henry Kissinger

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

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
- Henry Kissinger

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.
- Henry Kissinger

No foreign policy – no matter how ingenious – has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.
- Henry Kissinger

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
- Henry Kissinger

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.
- Henry Kissinger

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
- Henry Kissinger

High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.
- Henry Kissinger

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, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.
- Henry Kissinger

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
- Henry Kissinger

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
- Henry Kissinger

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
- Henry Kissinger

The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
- Henry Kissinger

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

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

Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.
- Henry Kissinger