Henry A. Kissinger
Henry A. Kissinger
Henry Alfred Kissingeris an American diplomat and political scientist. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as United States Secretary of State in the administrations of presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. For his actions negotiating the ceasefire in Vietnam, Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances, with two members of the committee resigning in protest. Kissinger later sought, unsuccessfully, to return the prize. After his term, his advice has been sought by world leaders...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionStatesman
Date of Birth27 May 1923
CountryGermany
People think responsibility is hard to bear. It's not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.
Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.
Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?
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.
President Nixon in his inaugural address indicated that he wanted an era of negotiation. Our reasoning was that whatever our ideological differences, whatever our geopolitical differences, we were condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons.
History knows no resting places and no plateaus
I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.
History is the memory of States.
Before there was the Soviet Union that could inflame matters. Now you have states not as powerful as the Soviet Union, but states like Iraq, like Iran, and to some extent Syria, having made it possible for some of these groups to operate. So it is a very difficult situation.
Our greatest foreign policy problem is our divisions at home. Our greatest foreign policy need is national cohesion and a return to the awareness that in foreign policy we are all engaged in a common national endeavor.
This country cannot afford to tear itself apart on a partisan basis on issues so vital to our national security.
We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape.. to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.
I believe in freedom of expression, and I believe that societies thrive when they permit freedom of expression.