1950s

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

• ... the most fundamental problem of politics, which is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.
  • 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", Time, 4 September 2014

1960s

• We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape — to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.
  • "The Vietnam Negotiations", Foreign Affairs, Vol. 48, No. 2 (January 1969), p. 214; also quoted as "A conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerilla army wins if he does not lose."

• There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
  • As quoted in The New York Times Magazine (1 June 1969)

1970s

• I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
  • Meeting of the "40 Committee" on covert action in Chile (27 June 1970) quoted in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974); the quotation was censored prior to publication due to legal action by the government. See New York Times (11 September 1974) "Censored Matter in Book About C.I.A. Said to Have Related Chile Activities; Damage Feared" by Seymour Hersh
  • Omi, M.; Winant, H. (2014). Racial Formation in the United States. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-135-12751-0. Retrieved on 2018-11-02. 

• [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.
  • 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

• Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.
  • As quoted in Sketchbook 1966-1971 (1971) by Max Frisch, p. 230

• It is barely conceivable that there are people who like war.
  • Transcript of telephone conversation with poet and anti-war activist Allen Ginsberg from the National Security Archive (23 April 1971)

• Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
  • 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)

• I've always acted alone. Americans like that immensely.
  Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol, since he doesn't shoot. He acts, that's all, by being in the right place at the right time. In short, a Western. … This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like, my technique.
  • Interview with Oriana Fallaci (November 1972), as quoted in "Oriana Fallaci and the Art of the Interview" in Vanity Fair (December 2006); Kissinger, as quoted in "Special Section: Chagrined Cowboy" in TIME magazine (8 October 1979) called this "without doubt the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press" and claimed that he had probably been misquoted or quoted out of context, but Fallaci later produced the tapes of the interview.

• "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."
  • National Security Study Memorandum 200. Adapted as policy by President General Ford originally classified.

• The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
  • 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
• Included in Cable P860114-1573_MC_b Wikileaks

• In the 1950s and 1960s we put several thousand nuclear weapons into Europe. To be sure, we had no precise idea of what to do with them.
  • Statement of 1973, as quoted in Canadian and World Politics (2005) by John Ruypers, Marion Austin, Patrick Carter, and Terry G. Murphy

• 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.
  • Statement of 1973, as quoted in "In Tapes, Nixon Rails About Jews and Blacks" in The New York Times (10 December 2010).

• The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
  • As quoted in "Special Section: They Are Fated to Succeed" in TIME magazine (2 January 1978)

• Ever since the secret trip to China, my own relationship with Nixon had grown complicated. Until then I had been an essentially anonymous White House assistant. But now his associates were unhappy, and not without reason, that some journalists were giving me perhaps excessive credit for the more appealing aspects of our foreign policy while blaming Nixon for the unpopular moves.
  These tendencies were given impetus by an interview I granted to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, without doubt the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press. I saw her briefly on Nov. 2 and 4, 1972, in my office. I did so largely out of vanity. She had interviewed leading personalities all over the world. Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown to me.
  • As quoted in "Special Section: Chagrined Cowboy" in TIME magazine (8 October 1979)

• 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.
  • The White House Years (1979)

1980s

• America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.
  • Henry Kissinger: The White House Years, quoted from Dinesh D'Souza: What's so great about America. This echoes Lord Palmerston's words: "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual".

• Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
  • The End of the Road (1982), Ch. 25 "Years of Upheaval"

• If you believe that their real intention is to kill you, it isn't unreasonable to believe that they would lie to you.
  • Observation made privately, quoted by Time journalist Michael Kramer, The Case for Skepticism Time, (26 December 1988), in the context of doubts about PLO sincerity in hinting about recognition of Israel.

• Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
  • As quoted in The Other 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1984) by Robert Byrne

1990s

• A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.
  • "Reflections on Containment", Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 3 (June 1994), p. 130

• 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.
  • Diplomacy (1994), p. 21

2000s

• If Tehran insists on combining the Persian imperial tradition with contemporary Islamic fervor, then a collision with America — and, indeed, with its negotiating partners of the Six — is unavoidable. Iran simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region of such importance to the rest of the world.
  • "The Next Steps With Iran" in The Washington Post (31 July 2006), p. A15

• 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.
  • 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)

• 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 threaten 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.
  • Munk debates – “21st Century will belong to China” – Kissinger, Zakaria, Ferguson, Li

• Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed ... History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized . . . So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.
  • Cited in "Identifying the Wild Beast and Its Mark", in The Watchtower (1 March 2004)

2010s

• In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role.
  • Henry Kissinger, "Out of the Brexit Turmoil: Opportunity", Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2016.

• Here, according to the mythology of the liberals, was a peaceful little country that Nixon attacked. The fact that there were four North Vietnamese divisions within 30 miles of Saigon coming across the border killing Americans—killing 500 a week starting within two weeks of Nixon’s inauguration—was ignored in the debate on Cambodia by protesters emphasizing the technical neutrality of Cambodia and ignoring that its ruler had invited our response.
  • On bombing Cambodia during the Vietnam war. From an interview with the Atlantic magazine - "The Lessons of Henry Kissinger" (10 November 2016)

• For 400 years, world history was made by Europeans. Many of the great ideas by which we live — constitutional government, freedom of the individual, the ideas of the Enlightenment — originated in Europe and were spread by Europe around the world. Now this region, which was dynamic and built the world, has become too preoccupied with itself. It confines itself basically to the exercise of soft power. At present, no European government has the capacity to ask its people for sacrifices on behalf of foreign policy. Unless Europe can recover some of its historic dynamism, there will be a big hole in the world system as it has until now manifested itself.
  • As quoted in "World Chaos and World Order: Conversations With Henry Kissinger", The Atlantic, November 10, 2016.

• Few countries in history have started more wars or caused more turmoil than Russia in its eternal quest for security and status. It is also true, however, that at critical junctures Russia has saved the world’s equilibrium from forces that sought to overwhelm it: from the Mongols in the 16th century, from Sweden in the 18th century, from Napoleon in the 19th century, and from Hitler in the 20th century. In the contemporary period, Russia will be important in overcoming radical Islam, partly because it is home to some 20 million Muslims, particularly in the Caucasus and along Russia’s southern border. Russia will also be a factor in the equilibrium of Asia.
  • As quoted in "World Chaos and World Order: Conversations With Henry Kissinger", The Atlantic, November 10, 2016.

• Both countries [the United States and China] consider themselves exceptional. The United States believes that our exceptionalism entitles us to educate others because if they adopt our principles, the world will be more peaceful. The Chinese do not strive for conversion. In their view, if you do not belong to Chinese culture, you can never become fully Chinese. Thus, they feel America has no moral right to intervene in their domestic affairs. Their analogy to conversion is that the majesty of their performance will so awe other societies that they will follow enough of the Chinese pattern to become cultural and political tributaries.
  • As quoted in "World Chaos and World Order: Conversations With Henry Kissinger", The Atlantic, November 10, 2016.