Best Kissinger Quotes & Sayings

Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today, with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars. — George Galloway

Dr. Kissinger was a former child. Jerry Ford was a former child. Even F.D.R. was a former child. I retired from the movies in 1949, and I'm still a former child. — Shirley Temple

Obama was the fourth president I had worked for who said outright that he wanted to eliminate all nuclear weapons (Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 were the others). Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary Bill Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn had also called for "going to zero." The only problem, in my view, was that I hadn't heard the leaders of any other nuclear country - Britain, France, Russia, China, India, or Pakistan - signal the same intent. — Robert M. Gates

When I first met him, he had a recurrent nightmare that Henry Kissinger was chasing him with a knife, and I said it was really his father, and he said it was really Henry Kissinger, and I said it was his father and he said it was Henry Kissinger, and this went on for months until he started going to the Central American shrinkette, who said Henry Kissinger was really his younger sister. — Nora Ephron

What do you call a co-worker these days? Neither teammate nor confederate will do, and partner is too legalistic. The answer brought from academia to the political world by Henry Kissinger and now bandied in the boardroom is colleague. It has a nice upper-egalitarian feel, related to the good fellowship of collegial. — William Safire

What Americans can't face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction. — Robert D. Kaplan

Together they [President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger] pursued ends that frequently had a tenuous link with reality, using means that were not merely disproportionate but counterproductive and untrue to those values they were meant to defend. In fact neither man demonstrated much faith in those values. — William Shawcross

On top of my to-do list in preparing for Beijing is 'On China' by Henry Kissinger, who has had firsthand experience with every top Chinese leader since Mao, so his insights are valuable and his access is perhaps unrivaled. — Gary Locke

Nixon's the kind of guy that if you were drowning fifty feet off shore, he'd throw you a thirty foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the President had met you more than half-way. — Mort Sahl

Henry Kissinger is possessed of a truly superior intelligence, in addition to which he has two qualities which, unfortunately, many great men lack: he is able to listen and he has a very subtle sense of humour. — Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

I wanted to look at how people deal with death ... Why is Henry Kissinger not in jail and Charles Manson is? — John Roecker

Henry Kissinger is perhaps the best-known American statesman of the 20th century. — Saul David

Flattery was one of Kissinger's principal tools in winning over Nixon, and a tool he employed shamelessly. — Robert Dallek

People say: But photographs are all lies. That's not the point. The lie is a truth, too. How the hell are we going to know what Kissinger looks like? Well, the photograph tells us one version; I'm trying to tell it also, but differently. — Leon Golub

Henry Kissinger may have wished I had presented him as a combination of Charles DeGaulle and Disraeli, but I didn't ... out of respect for DeGaulle and Disraeli. I described him as a cowboy because that is how he describes himself. If I were a cowboy I would be offended. — Oriana Fallaci

I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph. — Richard Avedon