World Order Quotes

“If the gap between the qualities required for election and those essential for the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and sense of history that should be part of foreign policy may be lost—or else the cultivation of these qualities may take so much of a president’s first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for the United States.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“Yet a surfeit of information may paradoxically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and push wisdom even further away than it was before. The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”:   Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just—not only by leaders, but also by citizens. It must reflect two truths: order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“if Afghanistan returns to its prewar status as a base for jihadist non-state organizations or as a state dedicated to jihadist policies: Pakistan above all in its entire domestic structure, Russia in its partly Muslim south and west, China with a significantly Muslim Xinjiang, and even Shiite Iran from fundamentalist Sunni trends.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“So long as strategic nuclear weapons were the principal element of Europe’s defense, the objective of European policy was primarily psychological: to oblige the United States to treat Europe as an extension of itself in case of an emergency.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany at the age of seventy-three, an age by which Bismarck’s career was nearing its end.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“the participants in the public debate risk being driven less by reasoned arguments than by what catches the mood of the moment. The immediate focus is pounded daily into the public consciousness by advocates whose status is generated by the ability to dramatize. Participants at public demonstrations are rarely assembled around a specific program. Rather, many seek the uplift of a moment of exaltation, treating their role in the event primarily as participation in an emotional experience. These attitudes reflect in part the complexity of defining an identity in the age of social media.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The candidates’ main role may become fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices? Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined?”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Asia’s International Order and China Of all conceptions of world order in Asia, China operated the longest lasting, the most clearly defined, and the one furthest from Westphalian ideas. China has also taken the most complex journey, from ancient civilization through classical empire, to Communist revolution, to modern great-power status—a course which will have a profound impact on mankind.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“A country whose security depends on producing a genius in each generation sets itself a task no society has ever met.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“For Roosevelt, if a nation was unable or unwilling to act to defend its own interests, it could not expect others to respect them. Inevitably,”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“تنعكس حيوية أي نظام دولي على التوازن الذي يحققه بين المشروعية والقوة والتركيز النسبي على كل منهما. أي من العنصرين لا يستهدف وقف التغيير لعلهما مجتمعين يحاولان ضمان حصول التغيير بوصفه موضوع تطور لا صراع إرادات فجاً.
إذا كان التوازن بين المشروعية والقوة مدار على نحو سليم فإن التحركات ستكتسب قدراً من العفوية واستعراضات القوة ستكون هامشية ورمزية إلى حد كبي.
ولأن تموضع القوى سيكون مفهوماً فإن أي طرف لن يشعر بالحاجة إلى استنفار كل ما لديه من قوة احتياطية.
أما حين يتم نسف التوازن فإن الضوابط تختفي وتغدو الساحة مفتوحة أمام أكثر الادعاءات شططاً واشد الأطراف الفاعلة عناداً زحقداً ثم تحل الفوضى إلى أن يتم استحداث ترتيبات نظام جديد.”
― هنري كيسنجر, World Order

“One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if applied correctly to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old problems of violent conflict. Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted in the Internet age, this theory posits, because “people who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“How would a restored Islamic world order relate to the modern international system, built around states? A true Muslim’s loyalty, al-Banna argued, was to multiple, overlapping spheres, at the apex of which stood a unified Islamic system whose purview would eventually embrace the entire world. His homeland was first a “particular country”; “then it extends to the other Islamic countries, for all of them are a fatherland and an abode for the Muslim”; then it proceeds to an “Islamic Empire” on the model of that erected by the pious ancestors, for “the Muslim will be asked before God” what he had done “to restore it.” The final circle was global: “Then the fatherland of the Muslim expands to encompass the entire world. Do you not hear the words of God (Blessed and Almighty is He!): ‘Fight them until there is no more persecution, and worship is devoted to God’?” Where possible, this fight would be gradualist and peaceful. Toward non-Muslims, so long as they did not oppose the movement and paid it adequate respect, the early Muslim Brotherhood counseled “protection,” “moderation and deep-rooted equity.” Foreigners were to be treated with “peacefulness and sympathy, so long as they behave with rectitude and sincerity.” Therefore, it was “pure fantasy” to suggest that the implementation of “Islamic institutions in our modern life would create estrangement between us and the Western nations.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“I want to express here my continuing respect and personal affection for President George W. Bush, who guided America with courage, dignity, and conviction in an unsteady time. His objectives and dedication honored his country even when in some cases they proved unattainable within the American political cycle.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Because in this view the domestic principles of an Islamic state were divinely ordained, non-Muslim political entities were illegitimate; they could never be accepted by Muslim states as truly equal counterparts. A peaceful world order depended on the ability to forge and expand a unitary Islamic entity, not on an equilibrium of competing parts.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“ALL TWELVE POSTWAR presidents have passionately affirmed an exceptional role for America in the world.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet. Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of all books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking—the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future. And style propels the reader into a relationship with the author, or with the subject matter, by fusing substance and aesthetics.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Two different people appealing to a search engine with the same question do not necessarily receive the same answers. The concept of truth is being relativized and individualized—losing its universal character.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“Jefferson “candidly confess[ed]” to President Monroe, “I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States.” And to James Madison, Jefferson wrote, “We should then have only to include the North [Canada] in our confederacy … and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“When urged to adhere to the international system’s “rules of the game” and “responsibilities,” the visceral reaction of many Chinese—including senior leaders—has been profoundly affected by the awareness that China has not participated in making the rules of the system. They are asked—and, as a matter of prudence, have agreed—to adhere to rules they had had no part in making.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“In a world where continental structures like America, China, and maybe India and Brazil have already reached critical mass, how will Europe handle its transition to a regional unit?”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“Religion and politics never merged into a single construct, leading to Voltaire’s truthful jest that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. they may deviate from the previous trajectory only within a finite margin. the great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. if they fall short, society stagnates. if they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Still, China was not a missionary society in the Western sense of the term. It sought to induce respect, not conversion; that subtle line could never be crossed. Its mission was its performance, which foreign societies were expected to recognize and acknowledge. It was possible for another country to become a friend, even an old friend, but it could never be treated as China’s peer.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order