Henry Alfred Kissinger (b.1923) is a German-born American diplomat and academic. As national security adviser (1969–75) and secretary of state (1973–77) under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger put into practice a significant reorientation of American foreign policy.
Born of in Fürth, Bavaria, Kissinger left Adolf Hitler’s Germany in 1938 and became an American citizen five years later. After serving in the U.S. Army as a sergeant, he attended Harvard and became a professor of government.
As America’s principal diplomat overseas, Kissinger helped to improve relations with both China and the Soviet Union. He negotiated the withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam, an effort that won him the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. He later restored diplomatic relations with Egypt following the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Kissinger has since served as a consultant and a respected commentator on international affairs. He has published two volumes of memoirs, The White House Years (1979) and Years of Upheaval (1982,) and many other books including Diplomacy (1995) and World Order (2015.)
Kissinger’s diplomacy during the Vietnam War and the covert American bombing of Cambodia (1969–70) that led to a catastrophic civil war are very controversial. Anglo-American journalist Christopher Hitchens published The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001) denouncing Kissinger as a war criminal. Hitchens also alleged that Kissinger contributed to politically-motivated mass murders in Chile, Cambodia, East Timor, and elsewhere.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Henry Kissinger
If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Goals
If we do what is necessary, all the odds are in our favor.
—Henry Kissinger
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Politics, Politicians, Reputation
I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Autobiography, Legacy
The vietnam war required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. … What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn’t make it.
—Henry Kissinger
For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: America
The essence of this man [Richard M. Nixon] is loneliness.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Loneliness
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Realistic Expectations, Concentration, Focus, Decisions
Even a paranoid can have enemies.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Enemy, Enemies
Nixon had three goals: to win by the biggest electoral landslide in history; to be remembered as a peacemaker; and to be accepted by the ‘Establishment’ as an equal. He achieved all these objectives at the end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973. And he lost them all two months later-partly because he turned a dream into an obsession
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Accomplishment
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Power
Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Moderation
We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Community
Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.
—Henry Kissinger
History knows no resting places and no plateaus.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Strength
The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerilla wins if he does not lose.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Success
There can’t be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Trouble, Crises
Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Vision, Leaders, Leadership
People think responsibility is hard to bear. It’s not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Responsibility
Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Adversity
The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Leadership, Leaders
The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.
—Henry Kissinger
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
—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
Topics: Leaders, Leadership
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
—Henry Kissinger
The most fundamental problem of politics, which is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.
—Henry Kissinger
The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: Independence
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.
—Henry Kissinger
Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.
—Henry Kissinger
Topics: The Military
Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world’s policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world’s midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.
—Henry Kissinger
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