Henry A. Kissinger

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

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

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching, but also without attempting to play God.

For other nations utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered, for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

No one will ever win the battle of the sexes, there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.

The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

If I should ever be captured I want no negotiation - and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.

It is after all the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.

While we should never give up our principles we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

If it's going to come out eventually better have it come out immediately.

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

We cannot always assure the future of our friends, we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.