Henry Kissinger
German-born US diplomat of Jewish heritage and religion.
I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.
[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.
Intellectuals are cynical and cynics have never built a cathedral.
If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.
The reason that academic politics is so vicious is that the stakes are so small.
A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.
Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?
Ever since the secret trip to China, my own relationship with Nixon had grown complicated. Until then I had been an essentially anonymous White House assistant. But now his associates were unhappy, and not without reason, that some journalists were giving me perhaps excessive credit for the more appealing aspects of our foreign policy while blaming Nixon for the unpopular moves.
These tendencies were given impetus by an interview I granted to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, without doubt the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press. I saw her briefly on Nov. 2 and 4, 1972, in my office. I did so largely out of vanity. She had interviewed leading personalities all over the world. Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown to me.