Kissinger Quotes

“Machiavelli asks “whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved?” He answers that “one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“the first symptoms of decline. “The collapse of nations,” he argued, was due to “internal rigidity coupled with a decline in the ability, both moral and physical, to shape surrounding circumstances. . . . What would have been Western history if the knights who defeated the Arabs at Tours had surrendered because they believed in the historic inevitability of the triumph of Christianity? Central Europe would today be Moslem.”134”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“The Kissingers descended from Meyer Löb (1767–1838), a Jewish teacher from Kleineibstadt who in 1817 took his surname from his adopted home of Bad Kissingen (complying with an 1813 Bavarian edict that required Jews to have surnames).47 By his first wife he had two children,”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“[T]o divine the direction on a calm sea may prove more difficult than to chart a course through tempestuous waters, where the violence of the elements imparts inspiration through the need for survival.”25”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“To many of our most responsible men, particularly in the business community, the warnings of impending peril or of imminent disaster sound like the Cassandra cries of abstracted ‘egg-heads’ … [Defense Secretary Charles Wilson and Treasury Secretary George Humphrey] simply cannot believe that in the nuclear age the penalty for miscalculation may be national catastrophe. They may know in their heads, but they cannot accept in their hearts, that the society they helped to build could disappear as did Rome or Carthage or Byzantium, which probably seemed as eternal to their citizens … The irrevocable error is not yet part of the American experience.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: Vol 1: The Idealist, 1923-1968

“The statesman is therefore like one of the heroes in classical drama who has had a vision of the future but who cannot transmit it directly to his fellow-men and who cannot validate its truth. Nations learn only by experience; they ‘know’ only when it is too late to act. But statesmen must act as if their intuition were already experience, as if their aspiration were truth.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: Vol 1: The Idealist, 1923-1968

“Statesmen generally have a tragic quality because they are condemned to struggle with factors which are not amenable to will and which cannot be changed in one lifetime… Foreign policy needs to be conducted with a premonition of catastrophe… The statesman is therefore like one of the heroes in classical drama who has had a vision of the future but who cannot transmit it directly to his fellow-men and who cannot validate its truth. Nations learn only by experience; they ‘know’ only when it is too late to act. But statesmen must act as if their intuition were already experience, as if their aspiration were truth.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: Vol 1: The Idealist, 1923-1968

“The American trait I dislike the most is their casual approach to life. No one thinks ahead further than the next minute, no one has the courage to look life squarely in the eye, difficult things are always avoided. No youth of my age has any kind of spiritual problem that he seriously concerns himself with… one of the main reasons why I have had difficulty making friends with any American.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: Vol 1: The Idealist, 1923-1968

“The American trait I dislike the most is their casual approach to life. No one thinks ahead further than the next minute, no one has the courage to look life squarely in the eye, difficult things are always avoided. No youth of my age has any kind of spiritual problem that he seriously concerns himself with […] one of the main reasons why I have had difficulty making friends with any American.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: Vol 1: The Idealist, 1923-1968

“The aim of Cold War competition in the third world was not to win a contest between rival models of economic development but above all to "fill(...) a spiritual void," for "even Communism has made many more converts through the theological quality of Marxism than through the materialistic aspect on which it prides itself.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: Vol 1: The Idealist, 1923-1968

“do you think that I believe that you will protect us? I said, yes. He said, I no longer believe that you will protect us. Your actions over recent years have made clear that to you detente is more important than anything else. I do not believe that any American president will risk nuclear war for Berlin; the only thing that is saving us is that the Soviets cannot be sure of this.72”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“It was misconceived because Johnson appeared to think the kind of tactics that worked in a Texas saloon would work in Vietnam: beat a man, then stop beating him and say, “Give in, or I’ll beat you some more.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“Let’s face up to the question of who we support; let’s defend the bastards and reform them later. ”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“Since no country has had any experience with the tactical use of nuclear weapons, the possibility of miscalculation is considerable. The temptation to use the same target system as for conventional war and thereby produce vast casualties will be overwhelming. The pace of operations may out strip the possibilities of negotiation. Both sides would be operating in the dark with no precedents to guide them.119”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“The final National Strategic Target List specified 1,050 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs) for nuclear weapons, including 151 urban-industrial assets. Even the minimal version of the plan envisioned 650 DGZs being hit by over 1,400 weapons with a total yield of 2,100 megatons.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“I would feel happier about professions of high moral principles if they did not so frequently coincide with a policy of minimum risk.”189”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“Vice President Nixon the following year: he was even prepared to use atomic weapons to shore up the French position in Indochina.63 “The United States cannot afford to preclude itself from using nuclear weapons even in a local situation,”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“The thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. . . . The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered and most richly fed. —WILLIAM JAMES1”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“Only general officers were entitled to know our true rank. To all others our standard reply to the inevitable question, “What is your rank?” was simply a firm, “My rank is confidential, but at this moment I am not outranked.”39”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“All these people want is a chance for the future, a chance they will follow with a strict consequentness [sic]. They will resent pity, they will be suspicious of oversolicitousness. They have seen man from his most evil side, who can blame them for being suspicious? They will resent having somebody plan every little detail for them. And in all fairness, who can blame them for that? Have they not lived in the land of the dead and so what can be so terrifying about the land of the living?”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“In particular, it lacked the skills to carry out pacification effectively—or as Kissinger politely put it, “the special qualities developed in a decade or more of combat training do not include discriminating political judgment in volatile and complex circumstances.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“European sense. No one can predict how it will end because there is no precedent for it.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“The frenzy of the cheering at the Cow Palace was reminiscent of Nazi times. . . . They [the Goldwater supporters] are the middle class gone rampant: the technocrats, the white collar workers impelled by an almost fanatical zeal. They are the result of a generation of liberal debunking, of the smug self-righteousness of so many intellectuals. . . . They have a faith not a party. The delegates walking around with stamp out Huntley and Brinkley* buttons are a new phenomenon. The delegate who said to me I am sorry the button is not big enough to include Howard K. Smith and all Eastern newspapers was a new form of delegate. This group once organized will be hard to dislodge. It will try to become the residuary legatee of all crises that are likely over the next decade. . . . The Goldwater victory is a new phenomenon in American politics—the triumph of the ideological party in the”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

“Let every nation know,” declared Kennedy in his inaugural address, “that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
― Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist