Kissinger Quotes

“Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.”

“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

“Christmas 1972 was a lonely time for Kissinger, as well as for his boss, and a period of serious reflection. Kissinger was then a bachelor, enamored of the tall, elegant, but elusive WASP Nancy Maginnes, but still very much a bachelor - Washington's most sought-after bachelor.”

“[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.”

“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.”

“Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.”

“I don't see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.”

“Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.”

“University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

“Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.”