Henry A. Kissinger
One of the hardest things for the president is to distinguish the routine issues that come through from the essential issues that affect the long term, and not to let himself get sucked into the battles of the bureaucracy for marginal issues, and to keep them focused and to keep his mind clear on what the fundamental things are that he has to accomplish.Collection: Long
Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered.Collection: Office
Well it did not make excessive sense to say that 20 million people are the recognized government of a billion people that have their own institutions. We did not change it in the sense that we said this has to end, but there was a U.N. vote that transferred the legitimacy of China from Taiwan to Beijing. Beijing was recognized as the government of all of China. Then, under President Carter, we followed what the U.N. had already done eight years earlier.Collection: Eight
When I first saw China, there were no automobiles. There were no supermarkets. There were no high-rise buildings. There were no consumer goods. There were no restaurants that were at least accessible that foreigners could see. It was a Stalinist society, and a very poor Stalinist society. So the economic system has totally changed, and the private sector in the economic system is now the dominant sector. It didn't exist at all as late as 1979.Collection: Saws
Administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.Collection: War
You should not think that you can shape history only by your will. This is also why I'm against the concept of intervention when you don't know its ultimate implications.Collection: Thinking
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 fourteen 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 involve in a disastrous for the peace of the world.Collection: Country
Becoming conscious is of course a sacrilege against nature; it is as though you had robbed the unconscious of something. The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault.Collection: Nice
Now we have a whole series of problems - energy, environment, proliferation - which go beyond the nation. And we also know that a conflict between major powers would be a catastrophe for which there is no compensation in anything you can gain.Collection: Gains
We are doomed to coexist.Collection: Israel
I think China will do nothing to obstruct it, and they probably will go along with it.Collection: Thinking
I would have said, before the World Trade Center events, that he would try to get a normal relationship with China - making clear to China what the limits are of what America can accept, but also showing understanding for some of Chinese necessities. I thought he was moving towards the position that I have more or less advocated.Collection: Moving
He [Deng Xiaoping] said that he did not understand why we failed to grasp that the alternative was not democracy, but total chaos and risking all the reforms that had been achieved.Collection: Democracy
We are not just any nation.Collection: 4th Of July
You know, this is a very strange phenomenon. I keep reading that in American newspapers, and I keep reading extensive speculations. I meet with the Chinese leaders periodically, and while I don't say they've endorsed the missile shield, it has not been in the forefront of their discussions.Collection: Reading
The position is that stability and peace in Asia depend on a cooperative relationship between China and the United States.Collection: United States
Historically when there is a rising power like China, it has usually led to confrontations between the rising power and the existing dominant powers. And when you have a shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, then you have an additional element.Collection: Rising
John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.Collection: Men
It is barely conceivable that there are people who like war.Collection: War
Statesman create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator.Collection: Leader
It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.Collection: Law
Nothing is more urgent than a serious, dare I say compassionate, debate as to where we are going at home and abroad. Technicians cannot master revolutions; every great achievement was an idea before it became a reality. Cathedrals cannot be built by those who are paralyzed by doubt or consumed by cynicism. If a society loses the capacity for great conception, it can be administered but not governed.Collection: Wisdom
Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.Collection: Ideas
In the current [Carter] administration, who can use the White House swimming pool and tennis courts is decided at the very highest level. President Ford did not bother himself with such minor details. He let me swim in the pool. He only got upset when I tried to walk across the water.Collection: Swimming
One theory is that we will make war look so attractive that we undermine the deterrent. That's Never Never Land. What we have now would have been enough to deter Hitler. But we are talking in a different order of reality.Collection: War
The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.Collection: Country
What China would do, I cannot predict. China has all but given up the claim to the use of force, except in the circumstance of Taiwan declaring its independence. That is a huge step forward over what the situation was many years ago.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Trying
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. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Responsibility
You become a superpower by being strong but also by being wise and by being farsighted. But no state is strong or wise enough to create a world order alone.Collection: Wise
You should not go to war for the privilege of withdrawal. You need to define your objective and the outcome, and it cannot be the removal of one man.Collection: War
University politics make me long for the simplicity of the Middle East.Collection: Science
I've often said that the desire to lecture China on how it should behave in the world is wrong. China was around for thousands of years even before America existed. It could even be that China's growing power will allow itself to be slowed down. But as long as this immense empire doesn't fall apart, it will become an important factor in global politics.Collection: Fall
The British capitalize on their accent when they don't want you to know what they're saying. But if you wake them up at 4 A.M., they speak perfect English, the same as we do.Collection: Travel
I wouldn't say it's a split. It's a difference of emphasis. It does exist between, I would say, the State Department and the Defense Department.Collection: Differences
I believe it is a mistake to isolate arms control from other areas of policy.Collection: Mistake
We cannot give Russia veto over deployment of forces on NATO territory. But we have to understand their particular sensitivities, and, therefore, there should be a dialogue on these issues.Collection: Issues
In the short term, it would not have made it possible to resume relations, because in the Chinese mind, the humiliation of China started with the annexation of Taiwan by Japan. If the United States had suddenly declared Taiwan as a separate state - for which we would have had no support among other nations - the consequences would have been giving up our relationship with China and committing ourselves to a long-term conflict with China.Collection: Giving Up
Any international system must have two key elements for it to work. One, it has to have a certain equilibrium of power that makes overthrowing the system difficult and costly. Secondly, it has to have a sense of legitimacy.Collection: Keys
The challenge is whether China as a rising country, the United States as the superpower, can develop a cooperative relationship in this period before nationalism becomes so dominant in China as a substitute for communism, and a kind of self-righteous isolationism in this country that substitutes China for the Soviet Union.Collection: Country
In my life, I have almost always been on the side of active foreign policy. But you need to know with whom you are cooperating. You need reliable partners.Collection: Needs
I have learned, as I wrote, that history must be discovered, not declared. It's an admission that one grows in life.Collection: I Have Learned
I want to thank you for stopping the applause. It is impossible for me to look humble for any period of time.Collection: Humble
Every American president, regardless of party, has said that America has an intense interest in a peaceful resolution. And I think it should be left at that.Collection: Party
90% of politicians give the other 10% a bad name.Collection: Names
Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.Collection: Exercise
A return to the 1967 lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival.Collection: Israel
Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states.Collection: Survival