13 Henry Kissinger Quotes on Strategy

Henry Kissinger quotes on strategy

1. A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves. [sic]

2. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.

5. In the 1950s and 1960s we put several thousand nuclear weapons into Europe. To be sure, we had no percise idea of what to do with them.

6. The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

10. If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.

28. If we do what is necessary, all the odds are in our favor.

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

35. Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.

39. No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

49. The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.

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

55. Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

59. You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.