How it works

High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

Henry A. Kissinger
Not a MindZip member yet
Decision
Decisions
Office
Perceptions
Random

Explore more quotes

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
Henry A. Kissinger
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
Henry A. Kissinger
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
Henry A. Kissinger
You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.
Henry A. Kissinger
Even a paranoid can have enemies.
Henry A. Kissinger
No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.
Henry A. Kissinger
The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.
Henry A. Kissinger
Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.
Henry A. Kissinger
We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.
Henry A. Kissinger
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
Henry A. Kissinger
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
Henry A. Kissinger
High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.
Henry A. Kissinger
Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.
Henry A. Kissinger
Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.
Henry A. Kissinger
Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.
Henry A. Kissinger
The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
Henry A. Kissinger
While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.
Henry A. Kissinger
Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.
Henry A. Kissinger
No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.
Henry A. Kissinger
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.
Henry A. Kissinger
To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.
Henry A. Kissinger
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
Henry A. Kissinger
I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
Henry A. Kissinger
It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.
Henry A. Kissinger
The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
Henry A. Kissinger
I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
Henry A. Kissinger
A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.
Henry A. Kissinger
The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.
Henry A. Kissinger
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
Henry A. Kissinger
The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
Henry A. Kissinger
Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
Henry A. Kissinger
We are all the President's men.
Henry A. Kissinger
A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
Henry A. Kissinger
If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation - and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.
Henry A. Kissinger
For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.
Henry A. Kissinger
Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.
Henry A. Kissinger
People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any form that would require me to stop talking for three hours.
Henry A. Kissinger
Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
Henry A. Kissinger
If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.
Henry A. Kissinger
The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.
Henry A. Kissinger
Power is the great aphrodisiac.
Henry A. Kissinger
The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
Henry A. Kissinger
In crises the most daring course is often safest.
Henry A. Kissinger
The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.
Henry A. Kissinger
Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.
Henry A. Kissinger
If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.
Henry A. Kissinger
Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.
Henry A. Kissinger
The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.
Henry A. Kissinger