Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

We have generals working on worst-case scenarios; we need statesmen on best cases.

The pressure of time, is the overwhelming challenge for policymakers who must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time and whose mistakes are irretrievable.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

The distinction between a statesman and a politician is that the former imposes his will and his ideas on his environment while the latter adopts himself to it.

Politics is the art of knowing and leading a multitude ... not where they want to go but where they should go.

Successful and unsuccessful political policies have one commonalty. The people who created the policies thought they would be successful.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

General Petraeus is not a miracle worker. He can not be successful unless the president creates greater confidence within his own team about the decisions which the president has himself made.

A prime minister has to keep a certain balance when dealing with sensitive issues.

My job is simply to give advice, to be a counselor to our nation's leaders.

Fortunately, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy disagreed with the estimate and chose a course of action less ambitious and aggressive than recommended by their advisers.

So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.

The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.

Let me control personnel, and I will ultimately control policy.

People (political and military leaders) much prefer to speak of what they are going to do rather than what the outcome will be.

Woe to the statesman whose reason for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning.

In many ways, however, inheriting success is as difficult as taking over at a time of crisis. The latter requires the leader to extricate the nation from its turmoil. While succeeding in such a situation is not easy, you begin at a lower base with a lot of upside. In my situation, the upside is not so obvious, but the downside is patently clear.

You do not build a foreign policy based on one man.

I’ve worked as a leader for many years and I’ve always trained myself to be prepared for the worst.

Only by decisions of national policy based upon accurate information can we have the chance that peace will endure.

Public policy must lead and not merely react.

In great crises, a man who has to act or speak stands bare and stripped of choice.

Ninety percent of foreign policy is reacting to whatever's happening out there.