Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

Let us not be deceived we are today in the midst of a cold war.

During the Cold War, we were interested because we were scared that Russia and the United States were going to go to war. We were scared that Russia was going to take over the world. Every country became a battleground.

People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War.

Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we'd have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see.

The Cold War is over but Cold War thinking survives.

The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.

Containment, as everyone will recall, was a rough plan for stopping the Communists any time they crossed a certain line dividing our half of the world from theirs.

Containment was merely appeasement on the installment plan.

The cold war is over; Japan won!

To Moscow, it must seem that the Cold War is only half over, since the West’s deterrence posture, although muted, lives on.

Every nation will continue to arm for war until a day comes at which one or the other says, “Better a terrible end, than a terror without end” or “If we delay any longer, we shall be the weaker instead of the stronger”. Then the catastrophe will happen.

The safest period of my lifetime was the Cold War, when Europe was more sharply divided than ever.

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

And I think detente had manifestly failed, and that the pursuit of it was encouraging Soviet expansion and rendering the world more dangerous, and especially rendering the Western world in greater peril.

The Cold War was a boring thing. Nobody gets better for it. Tremendous money is wasted. Our lives get more difficult. We look at each other as enemies. What's good in that? In any case, I will do anything in my power in order to stop another Cold War, with the U.S. or any other country in the world.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

It is not in the interest of the German people or in the interest of world peace that Germany should become a pawn or a partner in a military struggle for power between the East and the West.

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.

The Cold War is over. The kind of authority that the presidents asserted during the Cold War has now been diminished.

The only thing that kept the Cold War cold was the mutual deterrence afforded by nuclear weapons.

In 1945, at the beginning of the Cold War, our leaders led us astray. We need to think of the Cold War as an aberration, a wrong turn. As such, we need to go back to where we were in 1945 - before we took the road to a permanent war economy, a national security state and a foreign policy based on unilateralism and cowboy triumphalism.

We will always apply the same principles of collective security, prudent caution, and superior weaponry that enabled us to peacefully prevail in the long cold war against the Soviet Union.

The Cold War had become a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum.

The Cold War was wildly expensive and consumed the entire globe.