319 Quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

Certainly not a party of the workers and the peasants. In fact, Jiang Zemin in recent weeks has officially said that capitalists and the entrepreneurs should be enrolled in the Communist Party.

In a diplomatic negotiation, you always meet the same the other side all the time. Even if you should succeed in outsmarting him or in pressuring him, it only sets up a cycle in which he will try to get even.

People are now starting to explain the Cold War. Even in the crises at that time the survival of millions of people was at stake. And we (the USA) had to threaten the other super power with retaliation to prevent it from doing something to us. Today we live in a world in which a lot of things are in flux. That creates a lot of fear. But it is also a time of great opportunity. And I would call on today's statesmen to not allow their thinking to be directed by fear.

We are all the President's men.

Clearly security without values is like a ship without a rudder. But values without security are like a rudder without a ship.

It is frankly a mistake of amateurs to believe you can gain the upper hand in a diplomatic negotiation.

I don't know what happens in the next years. But I cannot now design a policy in which we try to keep China from developing, because in some years, if they develop, they might be rich enough to challenge us, and adopt the principle that we will hold down any state that might in the future become strong. That would make us a world empire for which we wouldn't have the talents or the convictions.

In the 1960s, I would have considered China with its CPC an ideologically more dynamic country than the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was strategically more threatening.

Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.