Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

The market economy itself was not a product of violent action—of revolutions—but of a series of gradual peaceful changes. The implications of the term “industrial revolution” are utterly misleading.

China has consistently surprised us. When I returned from the United States many years ago, it was unimaginable that we would end up where we are now. What China has achieved defies all logic. I credit this to the hard work and enterprising spirit of the Chinese people.

Well, as you've said, we cannot expect the people of China not to want to progress, so if you have an opportunity to progress, to develop your economy to a world class economy, it's an aspiration that is natural and that, I welcome.

The dramatic modernization of the Asian economies ranks alongside the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most important developments in economic history.

Give us 20 years, and you'll not recognize this country!

China's economic transformation began with the introduction in the 1980s of market incentives in the agricultural sector. These reforms were followed by a gradual opening to the global economy, a process that accelerated in the early 1990s.

As our economy advances, our government and our laws need to modernize, too.

Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.

It takes more than industry to industrialize.

I think the modernization of Chinese economy and Chinese society is a prime concern.

The society was so different [in China] - it was a feudalistic society. It didn't come to a point of industrial revolution until twenty years ago.

Instead of the scream of a fish hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress.

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household.

For one thing, to predict the advent of big business was considering the conditions of Marx's day an achievement in itself.

For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values.

Economic progress means the discovery and application of better ways of doing things to satisfy our wants. The piping of water to a household that previously dragged it from a well, the growing of two blades of grass where one grew before, the development of a power loom that enables one man to weave ten times as much as he could before, the use of steam power and electric power instead of horse or human power - all these things clearly represent economic progress.

In a fundamental sense, this debate about NAFTA is a debate about whether we will embrace these changes and create the jobs of tomorrow, or try to resist these changes, hoping we can preserve the economic structures of yesterday.

Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles-the fruits of peace.

This capitalist society has not lasted forever; it's only a few hundred years old.

Reversing structural problems in our economy that have been building up for two decades, that was gonna take time. It was gonna take more than a year. It was gonna take more than two years. It was gonna take more than one term. Probably takes more than one president.

The man who builds a factory, builds a temple.

China has, all of a sudden, found a way of putting the best of the best to work to build an economy that is growing at 10% to 12% per year, and now India is following. And those changes and how quickly they've come out of this mess, how little debt they have, is really important.

it [is] possible to suppose that, if Russia is allowed to have peace, an amazing industrial development may take place, making Russia a rival of the United States.

When I first saw China, there were no automobiles. There were no supermarkets. There were no high-rise buildings. There were no consumer goods. There were no restaurants that were at least accessible that foreigners could see. It was a Stalinist society, and a very poor Stalinist society. So the economic system has totally changed, and the private sector in the economic system is now the dominant sector. It didn't exist at all as late as 1979.

Well, the questioner came from Singapore, which has perhaps the best economic record in the history of developing an economy. And therefore he referred to 15 percent per annum as modest. It's not modest, it's arrogant.