The first reactions are often instinctive. So one of the first things we said was that the Chinese had no right to inspect the plane, and that we had a sovereign right to. I don’t know what the legal position is, but it was surely psychologically absolutely the unwise thing to do.

— Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger Quotes

The American formal position has been that we oppose violence by governments against their people. That principle should not be abandoned.

— Henry Kissinger

Whenever a new president comes in, people that are used to the previous president wonder if he has the same capacity.

— Henry Kissinger

When I became security advisor, I became familiar with the so-called SIOP war plans, I called in Secretary McNamara and asked him what they were hiding from me, because I couldn’t believe that the National policy would foresee such a level of destructiveness.

— Henry Kissinger

At any rate, mutually assured destruction was never our policy.

— Henry Kissinger

Many of the scientists have believed that their contribution to ending the nuclear race is not to let any new weapons to be developed.

— Henry Kissinger

I believe it is a mistake to isolate arms control from other areas of policy.

— Henry Kissinger

You should not think that you can shape history only by your will. This is also why I’m against the concept of intervention when you don’t know its ultimate implications.

— Henry Kissinger

The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.

— Henry Kissinger

Realism in foreign policy is made up of a clear set of values, since difficult foreign policy decisions are often decided with the narrowest of majorities. Without any sense of what is right and wrong, one would drown in a flood of difficult and pragmatic decisions.

— Henry Kissinger

Statesmen think in terms of history and view society as an organism. Prophets are different since they believe absolute aims can be achieved in the foreseeable future. More people have been killed by crusaders than by statesmen.

— Henry Kissinger

I had an opportunity to express my views, yes. I agreed with the approach which we took, namely, to make a distinction between the loss of life of the Chinese pilot and our military operations outside territorial waters or territorial limits.

— Henry Kissinger

The Chinese, on the other hand, were in the position of having an American military spy plane on a Chinese military base and they had their own internal problems to deal with. At first, the Chinese weren’t all that belligerent. They were just stalling to get their own bureaucracy in line.

— Henry Kissinger

The first reactions are often instinctive. So one of the first things we said was that the Chinese had no right to inspect the plane, and that we had a sovereign right to. I don’t know what the legal position is, but it was surely psychologically absolutely the unwise thing to do.

— Henry Kissinger

Well, on the American side, every new administration has to cut its teeth in a crisis, because before a crisis, you don’t really know what your various subordinates are thinking under stress.

— Henry Kissinger

It is frankly a mistake of amateurs to believe you can gain the upper hand in a diplomatic negotiation.

— Henry Kissinger

Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states.

— Henry Kissinger

China is a one party state. Sooner or later China will get to the point when the new social classes, which have emerged thanks to economic success, will have to be integrated into the political system. There is no guarantee that this process will run smoothly.

— Henry Kissinger

American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.

— Henry Kissinger

In a diplomatic negotiation, you always meet the same the other side all the time. Even if you should succeed in outsmarting him or in pressuring him, it only sets up a cycle in which he will try to get even.

— Henry Kissinger

Certainly nothing is easier than to rewrite history. If we had made Taiwan a separate state, it would have led to a fundamental conflict with China, and probably to war. Certainly in the long term, it would have led to war.

— Henry Kissinger
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