Henry Kissinger: Trending quotes (page 2)

Henry Kissinger trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
Henry Kissinger: 100   quotes 20   likes

“Military men are "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy.”

Henry Kissinger

Kissinger has denied saying it.
The only evidence that Kissinger ever said this was a claim in the book, The Final Days, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in chapter 14 (p.194 in the 1995 paperback edition). Woodward & Bernstein claimed that one of Kissinger's political foes, Alexander Haig, had told someone unnamed, that he (Haig) had heard Kissinger say it. That's triple hearsay, made even weaker by the fact that one of the parties is anonymous. Kissinger has denied ever saying it, and it was never substantiated by Haig, nor by anyone of known identity who claimed to have heard it. As Kirkus Reviews noted about the whole book, "none of it is substantiated in any assessable way."
In fact, the quote is not even very plausible, on its face. Kissinger served with distinction in the U.S. Army during WWII, and was awarded the Bronze Star. He has always been very respectful of other servicemen and their sacrifices. For him to have said such a thing would have been wildly out of character. In fact, the awkward phrasing doesn't even sound like Kissinger, whose English prose is consistently measured and careful, despite his heavy accent, even when he speaks extemporaneously.
Misattributed

Men , Stupidity , Animals

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Henry Kissinger

As quoted in The New York Times (28 October 1973)
Lesser known variant: Power is the great aphrodisiac.
As quoted in The New York Times (19 January 1971)
1970s

“Don't be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.”

Henry Kissinger
Thinking

“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.”

Henry Kissinger

As quoted in "Special Section: They Are Fated to Succeed" in TIME magazine (2 January 1978) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,915860,00.html
1970s

“There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.”

Henry Kissinger

As quoted in The New York Times Magazine (1 June 1969)
1960s
Variant: There can't be a crisis next week, my schedule is already full.

Funny

“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

Henry Kissinger

As quoted in The Washington Post (23 December 1973); he later joked further on this remark, on 10 March 1975 saying to Turkish Foreign Minister Melih Esenbel in Ankara, Turkey:
Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." … But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that.
As quoted in "Sunshine Week Document Friday! Kissinger Says, “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer. But since the FOIA, I’m afraid to say things like that.” in Unredacted : The National Security Archive, unedited and uncensored http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/document-friday-kissinger-says-the-illegal-we-do-immediately-the-unconstitutional-takes-a-little-longer-but-since-the-foia-im-afraid-to-say-things-like-that/
Included in Cable P860114-1573_MC_b http://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/P860114-1573_MC_b.html#efmCS3CUB Wikileaks
1970s

“Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system. Empires have no need for a balance of power. That is how the United States has conducted its foreign policy in the Americas, and China through most of its history in Asia.”

Henry Kissinger book Diplomacy

Diplomacy https://books.google.com/books?id=VPHQMG3Ue1wC&pg=PA21 (1994), p. 21
1990s

History

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Henry Kissinger

Statement of 1973, as quoted in "In Tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and Blacks" in The New York Times (10 December 2010) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/us/politics/11nixon.html.
1970s

“Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.”

Henry Kissinger

As quoted in Sketchbook 1966-1971 (1971) by Max Frisch, p. 230
1970s

“If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.”

Henry Kissinger

Commenting on the Iraq War in a BBC interview of 19 November 2006, as quoted in "Kissinger: Iraq military win impossible" by Tariq Panja, Associated Press, at Yahoo! News (20 November 2006) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061120/ap_on_re_mi_ea/britain_iraq_kissinger
2000s

War , Democracy , Support , Time

“Accept everything about yourself — I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end — no apologies, no regrets.”

Henry Kissinger

Clark Moustakas, as quoted in Sacred Simplicities: Meeting the Miracles in Our Lives (2004) by Lori Knutson, p. 141
Misattributed

“It is a mistake to assume that diplomacy can always settle international disputes if there is "good faith" and "willingness to come to an agreement". For in a revolutionary international order, each power will seem to its opponents to lack precisely these qualities. […] In the absence of an agreement on what constitutes a reasonable demand, diplomatic conferences are occupied with sterile repetitions of basic positions and accusations of bad faith, or allegations of "unreasonableness" and "subversion". They become elaborate stage plays which attempt to attach as yet uncommitted powers to one of the opposing systems.”

Henry Kissinger book A World Restored

A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22 (1957), p. 2
1950s

Faith

“Wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States.”

Henry Kissinger

National Security Study Memorandum 200. Adapted as policy by President General Ford originally classified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Study_Memorandum_200
1970s

Birth

“It is barely conceivable that there are people who like war.”

Henry Kissinger

Transcript of telephone conversation with poet and anti-war activist Allen Ginsberg from the National Security Archive http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB263/19710423-1950-Ginsberg-FIX.pdf (23 April 1971)
1970s

War , People

“… the most fundamental problem of politics, which is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.”

Henry Kissinger book A World Restored

A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22 (1957), p. 206
Paraphrased variant: The most fundamental problem of politics is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.
Quoted by Walter Isaacson, " Henry Kissinger Reminds Us Why Realism Matters http://time.com/3275385/henry-kissinger/", Time, 4 September 2014
1950s

Problem

“[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.”

Henry Kissinger

Phone call with Gen. Alexander Haig (9 December 1970) quoted in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 123. The quotation was an excerpt from one of several phone conversations in which Kissinger ridiculed Nixon’s views about the war: "When Nixon proposed an escalation in the bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger and Haig felt obliged to humor the president while laughing at him behind his back" (Washington Post, May 27, 2004). Transcript at the National Security Archive http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/Box%2029,%20File%202,%20Kissinger%20%96%20Haig,%20Dec%209,%201970%208,50%20pm%20106-10.pdf
1970s

“The issue before us is whether the 21st century belongs to China. And I would say that China will be preoccupied with enormous problems internally, domestically with its immediate environment, and that I have enormous difficulty imagining it will be dominated by China, and indeed, as I will conclude, I believe that the concept that some country will dominate the world, is in itself a misunderstanding of the world in which we now live… In the geopolitical situation, China historically has been surrounded by a group of smaller countries, which themselves were not individually able to threathen China, but which united, could cause a threat to China, and therefore historically, Chinese foreign policy can be described as "barbarian management". So China had never had to deal in a world of countries of approximately equal strength, and so to adjust to such a world, is in itself a profound challenge to China, which now has 14 countries on its borders, some of which are small, but can project their nationality into China, some of which are large, and historically significant, so that any attempt by Chinese to dominate the world, would evoke a counter-reaction that would be disastrous for the peace of the world.”

Henry Kissinger

Munk debates – “21st Century will belong to China” – Kissinger, Zakaria, Ferguson, Li http://www.livestream.com/munkdebates/video?clipId=pla_937b4cf4-e0ea-4ed5-a458-6a3ba43769b8
2000s

World , Peace , Imagination , Problem