11 Henry Kissinger Quotes on Leadership

Henry Kissinger quotes on leadership

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

16. As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by impersonal forces. But when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make.

30. In crises the most daring course is often safest.

32. It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

34. It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

35. Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

37. 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.

40. 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.

50. The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.

51. The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.

56. When you meet the president, you ask yourself, 'How did it ever occur to anybody that he should be governor much less president?'