Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

Disarment ... is a continuing imperative.

It is the ultimate end of absurdity for the arms race to go on.

The distinction between preparations made with the intention of going to war and preparations against attack is it true distinction, clear and definite than the mind of those who build up armaments. But it is a distinction that is not obvious or certain to others. The moral is obvious: it is that that armaments lead inevitably to war.

The Mutual Security Act was intended not to fight a war but to prevent a war.

The most fundamental purpose of government is defense, not empire.

We pacifists have not ceased to point to the grave danger of armaments and to insist on their curtailment.

In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon as prepared for, it insists on making war.

The popular, and one may say naive, idea is that peace can be secured by disarmament and that disarmament must therefore precede the attainment of absolute security and lasting peace.

When distrust exists between governments, when there is a danger of war, they will not be willing to disarm even when logic indicates that disarmament would not affect military security at all.

The core of detente [with Russia] is the reduction in arms.

The [foreign] policy of the United States is modeled on interventionism and aggression. It is logical that we should always be very suspicious.

Talking to the superpowers about disarmament is like talking to drug dealers about stopping drug deliveries.

A nation’s capacity for compromise decreases as its re-armament increases.

Unilateral preemption should not in any way be the model for how we conduct international relations... It brings us into very dangerous territory and it could be used and abused by any other country. We need to continue to base our security on multilateralism, and on the Security Council.

The urgent moral priority of our time is to dismantle the warfare state, disarm the nukes, roll back the empire from every corner of the globe. We want to live in a country even a crazy man can head and not have it be dangerous for us or the world.

Shall we be defenseless America, a weak and harmless nation, or shall we be defensive America, the fear and dread of all nations?

We are ready to cooperate with other nations to approximate disarmament, but merest prudence forbids that we disarm alone.

The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government

But which is the State's essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care.

The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies.

So long as peace is not attained by law (so argue the advocates of armaments) the military protection of a country must not be undermined, and until such is the case disarmament is impossible.

There are some people that will be deterred by the fact that we have nuclear weapons... But those people are the folks we can deal with anyway.

Libya is a good example of a country that has come to a realization that weapons of mass destruction threaten more than assure, and I hope that will be followed by others.

Today the predatory state, or the predatory group of states, with power of total destruction, is no more to be tolerated than the predatory individual.

The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.