Quotes by Henry Kissinger

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think its their fault.

Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But its very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what theyre doing.

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

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

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

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.

The statesmans duty is to bridge the gap between his nations experience and his vision.

Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries havent seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came in to office.

A leader who confines his role to his peoples experience dooms himself to stagnation a leader who outstrips his peoples experience runs the risk of not being understood.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

Leadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelts time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, its different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.

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

Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.

Art is mans expression of his joy in labor.

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

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

I dont see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.

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

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.