Henry Kissinger

“If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.”

“Politicians are like dogs... Their life expectancy is too short for a commitment to be bearable”

“I have spoken to Chinese leaders occasionally on human rights, but I've always done it in private.”

“Every first-term president has to learn something after he comes into office. Nobody can be completely ready for the inevitable crises.”

“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.”

“Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.”

“Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.”

“There has come into being a kind of a Shia belt from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut. And this gives Iran the opportunity to reconstruct the ancient Persian Empire - this time under the Shia label.”

“A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.”

“The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.”

“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.”

“I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.”

“Leadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelt's time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, it's different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.”

“I don't ascribe to myself any special competence in economic insight. I translate what I hear from highly intelligent people into political and philosophical propositions.”

“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

“The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.”

“Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.”

“Americans have a tendency to believe that when there's a problem there must be a solution.”

“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.”