Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

An expert is someone who articulates the needs of those in power.

Power gravitates to the man who knows how.

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

The less people know about what is going on, the easier it is to wield power and authority.

What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power.

The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.

Politics and power is a realm of relative influence.

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

People in power, they're so used to people kind of playing up to them.

I used to pull rank and wait until the wind was blowing out.

And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?

The concept of power we admire is power over someone else.

The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.

Think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value of information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.

I like power and I like to use it.

He was always testing you. He was always testing his power.

Power is not just political. It can be cultural; it can be spiritual.

Power has no limits.

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

Whatever my aims and agendas were, I never asked for power.

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.

You can muscle your way to the top as long as you're part of the production, which I am. I'm knitted into the money, so it's very hard to extricate me from the decision-making dynamic.

Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.

What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

The primary object of every elite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power and privilege.