Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

I think Putin has changed, for sure. He has changed over time and he has been emboldened by, whether it's true or not, the perception is that we've pulled back, so people do change and this is an example of that.

Let's say there are prospects for a new Nigeria, but I don't think we have a new Nigeria yet.

Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.

The reform and opening up of China hasn't been happening quite the way we've been told, like a small bird breaking out of its egg. Its more like a cicada shedding its skin, emerging ever so slowly. Energy is the last part of that shell that needs to be shed.

The Soviet system is how everything here works. It's very difficult to break the system. The system is big and inflexible, uneffective, and also corrupt. And that is our main goal: to change the system, to break the system, to make it modern.

I think I've set some big goals. The American people haven't had a raise in 15 years. Getting incomes up is a huge goal. Now maybe it's not as exciting to some people, but it's a huge goal.

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

That's the kind of thinking that our country needs. When we have a country that's doing so badly, that's being ripped off by every single country in the world, it's the kind of thinking that our country needs, because everybody, we have a trade deficit with all of the countries that we do business with, of almost $800 billion a year.

The dictator can be removed in a day, but it can take years to stamp out the lingering remnants of his dictatorship

There are some groups that for years and years have not gotten the rights that the majority of human beings have, and I think that it's important to continue to draw these parallels so that when we think about our future we can change some of the lives of people who love differently than we do, look different than we do, who come from a different class. It's all about bringing awareness to how important it is to be accepting of people...and there will be oppression if one group thinks they're more important or superior.

Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you

I think we had quite enough capitalism in the last eight years; I think we need some regulation now.

People will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately.

What is applicable is to understand that first of all China has undergone a huge revolution in the last years. Anyone who saw China as I did in 1971 - and for that matter even in 1979, because not much had changed between 1971 and 1979 - and sees China today, knows one is in a different economic system.

I think that any black man who teaches black people to turn the other cheek and suffer peacefully after they've been turning the cheek and suffering peacefully for 400 years in a land of bondage, under the most cruel, inhuman and wicked slavemaster that any people have ever been under, he is doing those people an injustice, and he's a traitor to his own people.

I think like a lot of people in this country I want to see a vision. And, again, that would be true of candidates on all levels. It's time to see a clear, bold vision for progressive economic change.

All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don't want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow's sky. That's what I want now, and I think it's what you should want too. But it will be too late soon. We'll become too set to change. If we don't take our chance now, another may never come for either of us.

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.

Who do you think is more difficult to face: oppressive governments, or oppressive societies?

The message is resonating, not just in Wisconsin, but all over America, the people are sick and tired of establishment politics, establishment economics. They want real change.

I'm in favor of doing tax reform, but I think tax reform ought to be revenue neutral as it was back during the [Ronald] Reagan years. We've resolved this issue.

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.

Deng Xiaoping thought of himself as a great revolutionary and a great reformer. He had dismantled the Chinese communist management of the economy. In my next-to-last conversation with him, which was about six months before Tiananmen Square, he said to me that his aim would be the next phase to reduce the Communist Party to philosophical issues. And I said, "What's a philosophical issue?" And he said, "Well, like if we make an alliance with Russia." Given his view of Russia, that was not the likeliest thing that would ever happen.

I think crisis starts with the government of Puerto Rico. It has to take measures to solve the fiscal problems that it has, which are very serious. It's very basic: it's the same thing that is happening in Washington.

Sometimes it takes a crisis for people to agree that what is obvious and should have been done years ago, can no longer be postponed. We must create a new international financial architecture for the global age.