World Order Quotes

“Its requirement of frequent daily prayers made faith a way of life; its emphasis on the identity of religious and political power transformed the expansion of Islam from an imperial enterprise into a sacred obligation.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“The United States has every reason from history and geopolitics to bolster the European Union and prevent its drifting off into a geopolitical vacuum; the United States, if separated from Europe in politics, economics, and defense, would become geopolitically an island off the shores of Eurasia, and Europe itself could turn into an appendage to the reaches of Asia and the Middle East.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“The nature of these challenges was not singular to the 1930s. In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it. The interwar years’ toxic mixture of facile pacifism, geopolitical imbalance, and allied disunity allowed these forces a free hand.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“In short, from the earth to Saturn, from the history of the heavens to that of insects, natural philosophy has been revolutionized; and nearly all other fields of knowledge have assumed new forms … [T]he discovery and application of a new method of philosophizing, the kind of enthusiasm which accompanies discoveries, a certain exaltation of ideas which the spectacle of the universe produces in us—all these causes have brought about a lively fermentation of minds. Spreading through nature in all directions like a river which has burst its dams, this fermentation has swept with a sort of violence everything along with it which stood in its way.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“The rich fertility of China’s plains and a culture of uncommon resilience and political acumen had enabled China to remain unified over much of a two-millennia period and to exercise considerable political, economic, and cultural influence—even when it was militarily weak by conventional standards. Its comparative advantage resided in the wealth of its economy, which produced goods that all of its neighbors desired. Shaped by these elements, the Chinese idea of world order differed markedly from the European experience based on a multiplicity of co-equal states.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“the kowtow was symbolically voluntary: it was the representative deference of a people that had been not so much conquered as awed. The tribute presented to China on such occasions was often exceeded in value by the Emperor’s return gifts.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Can governmental orders be invented from scratch by intelligent thinkers, or is the range of choice limited by underlying organic and cultural realities (the Burkean view)?”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Nel VII secolo l’Islam era dilagato in tre continenti in un’ondata senza precedenti di esaltazione religiosa ed espansione imperiale. Dopo aver unificato il mondo arabo, impadronendosi di resti dell’Impero romano, e inglobato l’Impero persiano, l’Islam si era trovato a governare il Medio Oriente, il Nord Africa, vaste zone dell’Asia e parti dell’Europa. Nella sua concezione di ordine universale era destinato a espandersi sulla «casa della guerra», come erano chiamate tutte le regioni popolate da infedeli, finché il mondo intero fosse divenuto un sistema unitario condotto all’armonia dal messaggio del profeta Maometto. Mentre l’Europa costruiva il proprio ordine multistatale, l’Impero ottomano a predominio turco rinnovava questa aspirazione a un unico governo legittimo ed estendeva la sua supremazia sul centro del mondo arabo, sul Mediterraneo, sui Balcani e sull’Europa orientale.”
― Henry A. Kissinger, Ordine mondiale

“La nostra epoca è alla ricerca insistente, a volte quasi disperata, di un’idea di ordine mondiale. Il caos incombe minaccioso, accompagnandosi con un’interdipendenza senza precedenti: nella proliferazione delle armi di distruzione di massa, nella disintegrazione degli Stati, nell’impatto delle devastazioni ambientali, nel persistere delle pratiche genocide e nella diffusione di nuove tecnologie che rischiano di spingere il conflitto al di fuori del controllo o della comprensione dell’uomo. Nuovi metodi di accesso all’informazione e di comunicazione uniscono differenti regioni come mai nel passato e proiettano gli eventi su scala globale, ma in un modo che impedisce la riflessione, costringendo i leader ad avere reazioni istantanee in forma di slogan. Ci aspetta forse un periodo in cui a determinare il futuro saranno forze che vanno oltre i limiti di un qualsiasi ordine?”
― Henry A. Kissinger, Ordine mondiale

“An alliance with France was enlisted in the war for independence from Britain, then loosened in the aftermath, as France undertook revolution and embarked on a European crusade in which the United States had no direct interest. When President Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address—delivered in the midst of the French revolutionary wars—counseled that the United States “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” and instead “safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies,” he was issuing not so much a moral pronouncement as a canny judgment about how to exploit America’s comparative advantage: the United States, a fledgling power safe behind oceans, did not have the need or the resources to embroil itself in continental controversies over the balance of power.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Roosevelt returned to this theme in his fourth inaugural address in 1945: We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust or with fear.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“The essence of building a constructive world order is that no single country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in the immediate post–Cold War period, when it was materially and psychologically preeminent.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Failure of the attempt to extinguish the newly declared State of Israel did not lead to a political settlement and the opening of state-to-state relations, as happened in most other postcolonial conflicts in Asia and Africa. Instead, it ushered in a protracted period of political rejection and reluctant armistice agreement against the background of radical groups seeking to force Israel into submission through terrorist campaigns.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Germany achieved unification as an affirmation of liberal democracy; it reaffirmed its commitment to European unity as a project of common values and shared development.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“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. Can today’s leaders rise above the urgency of day-to-day events to achieve this balance?”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“The two sides need to absorb the history of the decade before World War I, when the gradual emergence of an atmosphere of suspicion and latent confrontation escalated into catastrophe. The leaders of Europe trapped themselves by their military planning and inability to separate the tactical from the strategic.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“when Germany declared itself ready to discuss an armistice, Wilson refused to negotiate until the Kaiser abdicated.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“If the major powers come to practice foreign policies of manipulating a multiplicity of subsovereign units observing ambiguous and often violent rules of conduct, many based on extreme articulations of divergent cultural experiences, anarchy is certain.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“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?”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Yet after withdrawing from three wars in two generations—each begun with idealistic aspirations and widespread public support but ending in national trauma—America struggles to define the relationship between its power (still vast) and its principles.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“In the vacuum of authority following the demonstrations’ initial success, factions from the pre-uprising period are often in a position to shape the outcome.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Side by side with the limitless possibilities opened up by the new technologies, reflection about international order must include the internal dangers of societies driven by mass consensus, deprived of the context and foresight needed on terms compatible with their historical character. In every other era, this has been considered the essence of leadership; in our own, it risks being reduced to a series of slogans designed to capture immediate short-term approbation. 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. As diplomacy is transformed into gestures geared toward passions, the search for equilibrium risks giving way to a testing of limits.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“The Commander of U.S. Cyber Command has predicted that “the next war will begin in cyberspace.” It will not be possible to conceive of international order when the region through which states’ survival and progress are taking place remains without any international standards of conduct and is left to unilateral decisions.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering,”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century’s decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“It supported participatory governance in both friendly and adversarial countries; it played a leading role in articulating new humanitarian principles, and since 1945 it has, in five wars and on several other occasions, spent American blood to redeem them in distant corners of the world. No other country would have had the idealism and the resources to take on such a range of challenges or the capacity to succeed in so many of them. American idealism and exceptionalism were the driving forces behind the building of a new international order.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order