Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

There is no doubt that America is now the prime target of international communism.

The organizing principle of the United States defensive foreign policy had been opposition to the Soviet Union. There is no more Soviet Union.

Twenty years ago, I said there was going to be something that would stop the Soviet Union from taking over the world. And now we see that the Soviet Union has been stopped, through its own disintegration.

And the big question for the West, of course, and to the Europeans is, what other countries, which were formerly part of the Soviet bloc, should be incorporated into western institutions?

There's a tendency on the part of Americans, all of us, to say, 'Hey, the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is gone, we don't have to worry about these guys again.' We always have to be worried about them, we always have to be concerned about them, and we have to be well-informed.

I distinctly remember the vivacious optimism that inundated the United States when the Soviet Union imploded in the early 1990s. This was not glee generated by the doom of an implacable enemy, but thrill germinated by the real possibilities that the future held for freedom.

When I came to the Senate in 1997, the world was being redefined by forces no single country controlled or understood. The implosion of the Soviet Union and a historic diffusion of economic and geopolitical power created new influences and established new global power centers - and new threats.

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

With hindsight, we see that the Soviet Union never had a chance of world domination, but we didn't know that then.

Where were they when the Russians went down?

It's essential for the U.S. and Europe to prevent Putin from going farther and reversing the hard-won independence of former Soviet republics.

Moreover, the accomplishment of Russia's aims has been greatly simplified by the fact that we have heretofore offered the world no practical antidote for the Russian poison.

There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it's not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs.

By now it is evident that the Soviet Union must gain control of Europe to maintain its empire.

Hard men present hard choices - none more so than Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia.

Soviet expansionism in Europe, the battle for control of China, and the 1950 invasion of South Korea would shatter once-euphoric dreams of post-war cooperation with the Kremlin.

The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.

Containment was merely appeasement on the installment plan.

The United States is now, as the defunct Soviet Union was decades ago, the subversive agent of a world revolution.

The Cold War is Over

Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster…

My last words to you, my son and successor, are: Never trust the Russians!

That's the problem with Russia: The world has changed. Europe is not at war, and no one wants to negotiate with us. The world has changed, but Russia prefers to pretend it has not.

Russia is now a lonely fraction of what the old Warsaw pact was. It not only has lost its old Eastern European allies; those allies are now arrayed on the other side, as members of NATO

… this whole Near East problem is not just an Arab-Israeli dispute but a problem of the influence of the West as opposed to that of the Soviet. We want no wars, but we do not want a Sovietized world.