It is one of history’s ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.
HENRY KISSINGERIt’s a pity both sides can’t lose (commenting on Iran-Iraq war, 1980 – 1988)
More Henry Kissinger Quotes
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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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Yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace.
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History is the memory of States.
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For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings.
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Every victory is only the price of admission to a more difficult problem
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If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint.
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Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.
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The issues are too important to be left for the voters.
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The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
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Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems.
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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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Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy.
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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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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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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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