Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.
HENRY KISSINGEREach success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
More Henry Kissinger Quotes
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Because complexity inhibits flexibility, early choices are especially crucial.
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Americans have a tendency to believe that when there’s a problem there must be a solution.
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The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily.
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Yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace.
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Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.
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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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Poor old Germany. Too big for Europe, too small for the world
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Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy.
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Woe to the statesman whose arguments for entering a war are not as convincing at its end as they were at the beginning, Bismarck had cautioned.
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The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
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In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.
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Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.
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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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It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.
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To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires character and courage: character because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first. And the statesman must then inspire his people to persist in the endeavor.
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Don’t be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.
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The issues are too important to be left for the voters.
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In effect, none of the most important countries which must build a new world order have had any experience with the multi-state system that is emerging. Never before has a new world order had to be assembled from so many different perceptions, or on so global a scale.
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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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The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
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The war is just when the intention that causes it to be undertaken is just. The will is therefore the principle element that must be considered, not the means, He who intends to kill the guilty sometimes faultlessly shed the blood of the innocents
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Can governmental orders be invented from scratch by intelligent thinkers, or is the range of choice limited by underlying organic and cultural realities (the Burkean view)?
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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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The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
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There can’t be a crisis next week, my schedule is already full.
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A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security
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