Henry A. Kissinger Quotes About War

Quotes about: War

• You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Easter, War, Egypt

• 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

  War, President, Principles

• If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Peace, War, Patriotic

• What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Peace, War, Intelligence Services

• One theory is that we will make war look so attractive that we undermine the deterrent. That's Never Never Land. What we have now would have been enough to deter Hitler. But we are talking in a different order of reality.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Reality, Order

• We believe that peace is at hand.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Believe, Hands

• Administration has managed the extraordinary feat of having, at one and the same time, the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Presidential, Administration

• 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.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Military, War, Army

  "The Vietnam Negotiations". Foreign Affairs, Vol. 48, No. 2, p. 214, January 1969.

• They [American forces] are there as an expression of the American national interest to prevent the Iranian combination of imperialism and fundamentalist ideology from dominating a region on which the energy supplies of the industrial democracies depend.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Expression, Democracy

• No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Country, War, Eyelashes

• In a nuclear war, even if one side were to come out ahead by systems analytical standards, both sides would be so weakened, that it would - they would be in the position of Europe after the two World Wars.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Europe, Two

• I do not believe that Putin intends to leave office in a Cold War atmosphere with the United States.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Believe, Office

  Source: www.nytimes.com

• 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 A. Kissinger

  War, Believe, Levels

• With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Needs, Nuclear

• I would say the special experience of American wartime policy in the last 40 years, from Vietnam on, is that the war itself became controversial in the country and that the most important thing we need in the current situation is, whatever disagreements there may be on tactics, that the legitimacy of the war itself does not become a subject of controversy. We have to start with the assumption, obviously, that whatever administration is conducting a war wants to end it.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Country, War, Years

• In the period after the Second World War, there were still leaders in Europe who represented weak countries, but possessed a sense of global foreign policy. Nowadays, on the other hand, there are politicians who represent pretty powerful countries, but whose citizens are not prepared to sacrifice themselves for the state.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Country, Powerful, War

  Source: www.spiegel.de

• People are now starting to explain the Cold War. Even in the crises at that time the survival of millions of people was at stake. And we (the USA) had to threaten the other super power with retaliation to prevent it from doing something to us. Today we live in a world in which a lot of things are in flux. That creates a lot of fear. But it is also a time of great opportunity. And I would call on today's statesmen to not allow their thinking to be directed by fear.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Opportunity, Thinking

  Source: www.spiegel.de

• It is barely conceivable that there are people who like war.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, People

  April 23, 1971, telephone conversation with Allen Ginsberg. National Security Archive,

• 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 A. Kissinger

  War, Long, Taiwan

  Source: www.pbs.org

• 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.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Running, Country, Military

  "Kissinger: Victory in Iraq No Longer Possible". BBC interview, edition.cnn.com. November 19, 2006.

• You should not go to war for the privilege of withdrawal. You need to define your objective and the outcome, and it cannot be the removal of one man.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Men, Needs

• I think a resumption of the Cold War would be a historic tragedy. If a conflict is avoidable, on a basis reflecting morality and security, one should try to avoid it.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Thinking, Tragedy

  "Do We Achieve World Order Through Chaos or Insight". Interview With Uliane von Mittelstaedt, Erich Follath, www.spiegel.de. November 13, 2014.

• Let me make my point about Vietnam. When the Nixon initiation came into office, there were 550,000 Americans in combat. And ending the war was not a question of turning off a television channel. And so, debating on how we got there and what judgments were made was not going to help us.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  War, Office, Vietnam

  Source: www.nytimes.com

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