319 Quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

Our concern for human rights comes to the fore when there are gross violations of human decencies. Then other countries, including China, must recognize that this affects the American attitude towards their country. But towards what precise institutions will it evolve? I think we ought to leave something to history.

In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.

If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.

There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane: Either you have diarrhea, or you're anxious to meet people who do.

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

Deng Xiaoping thought of himself as a great revolutionary and a great reformer. He had dismantled the Chinese communist management of the economy. In my next-to-last conversation with him, which was about six months before Tiananmen Square, he said to me that his aim would be the next phase to reduce the Communist Party to philosophical issues. And I said, "What's a philosophical issue?" And he said, "Well, like if we make an alliance with Russia." Given his view of Russia, that was not the likeliest thing that would ever happen.

We are here because cooperative relations with China are in the American national interest. Every president for 30 years has come to that conclusion, and a rejection of this agreement would be a vote for an adversarial relationship with the most populous nation of China.