The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily.
HENRY KISSINGERMilitary men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
More Henry Kissinger Quotes
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It has the added advantage of being true.
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History knows no resting places and no plateaus
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It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.
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Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.
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Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God
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A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the harmony of the universe.
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Since Peter the Great, Russia had been expanding at the rate of one Belgium per year.
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There can’t be a crisis next week, my schedule is already full.
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If Chinese exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire, Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it.
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I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
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Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies.
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The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat.
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It is one of history’s ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.
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A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck’s nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.
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It’s a pity both sides can’t lose (commenting on Iran-Iraq war, 1980 – 1988)
HENRY KISSINGER