Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

China after Olympics will progress very slowly. But the demands for freedom - on the part of ordinary people but also party members - won't be as easy to contain.

You know the more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best. My only solution would be to keep em both out one term and hire my good friend Henry Ford to run the whole thing, and give him a commission on what he saves us.

We have a complete void of progressive politics in this country right now. The will of the people goes ignored and unrealized. I'm searching for the people that can enter the political system, a strong third party. We need to consolidate.

I'm trying to avail myself of the various technologies to get the message that Washington needs to be cleaned up, that the system that's in place is not what's beneficial in the country.

Much of what we see in America, what most people feel has been progress and good things, have been brought about by the existence of third parties.

Chinese people themselves, they really want change.

As long I still have a breath left in me I will dedicate myself fully to China's reform.

The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.

Politics is repetition. It is not change. Change is something beyond what we call politics. Change is the essence politics is supposed to be the means to bring into being.

Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn't anticipate.

Even if there have been setbacks during these past years, China is changing. China's society is opening.

The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.

There's a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he's a reformer.

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.

The China of the 1970s was a communist dictatorship. The China of the twenty-first century is a one-party state without a firm ideological foundation, more similar to Mexico under the PRI than Russia under Stalin. But the measurement of the political and the economic evolution has not yet been completed, and is one of the weak points of the system.

When I tried to create a new political party, which I stressed that this is not my party. I believe very much that there has to be a revolution and this is a party for the young.

Two significant developments in the past several decades have been the collapse of communism as an ideology and the general acceptance, in rhetoric, if not practice, of liberal democracy.

I am running for president as a Democrat. And if elected, not only do I hope to bring forth a major change in national priorities, but let me be frank, I do want to see major changes in the Democratic Party.

I think we've seen at least the beginnings of rather significant social and economic change in the Muslim world, which I think will in due course lead to more political change.

In this rigged, two-party system, third parties almost never win a national election. It's obvious what our function is in this constricted oligarchy of two corporate-indentured parties - to push hitherto taboo issues onto the public stage, to build for a future, to get a young generation in, keep the progressive agenda alive, push the two parties a little bit on this issue and that.

The problem with the West is that they start with political reform going towards democracy.

When [Nelson Mandela] was in prison I admired him for his moral strength... Of his period in power I can see few results. Apartheid no longer exists, at least to all appearances, but no one understands what the new government in South Africa is doing.

Anybody who's mad should run for something.

My definition of democracy is - A form and a method of Government whereby revolutionary changes in the social life are brought about without bloodshed. That is the real test. It is perhaps the severest test. But when you are judging the quality of the material you must put it to the severest test.