The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
— Henry Kissinger
To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.
If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.
The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.
Power is the great aphrodisiac.
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it's their fault.
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.
Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.
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.
You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.
The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.
Even a paranoid can have enemies.
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation - and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.
High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.
No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
