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Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.

Henry Kissinger

If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint.
HENRY KISSINGER

History Justice Peace Teaching
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
HENRY KISSINGER

Legal Politics Time
George Bernard Shaw: There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.
HENRY KISSINGER

Desire Heart Life Lose Tragedy Yourself
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it’s their fault.
HENRY KISSINGER

Funny Mistake People Thinking Yourself
The issues are too important to be left for the voters.
HENRY KISSINGER

Important Issue Vote
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.
HENRY KISSINGER

Fear Insecurity Nation Represent
The Soviet Union would never be bound by agreements, Deng warned; it understood only the language of countervailing force.
HENRY KISSINGER

Force Language Understand
The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.
HENRY KISSINGER

Moral Right Risk Survive
It is one of history’s ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.
HENRY KISSINGER

Class History Oneself
Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy.
HENRY KISSINGER

Force Rule
For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings.
HENRY KISSINGER

Character History Human Nation Play
The Art of War articulates a doctrine less of territorial conquest than of psychological dominance; it was the way the North Vietnamese fought America.
HENRY KISSINGER

Art Fight War
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
HENRY KISSINGER

Absence Mindset
A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security
HENRY KISSINGER

Moral Perfection Policy Security
A country whose security depends on producing a genius in each generation sets itself a task no society has ever met.
HENRY KISSINGER

Genius Security
Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies.
HENRY KISSINGER

Nation Rule Trust

Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.

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Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.

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