Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed... History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized..… - Henry Kissinger

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Every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed... History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized.... So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.

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About Henry Kissinger

Henry Alfred Kissinger (born Heinz Alfred Kissinger; May 27, 1923 – November 29, 2023) was a German-American politician, diplomat, and geopolitical consultant who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. For his actions negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam, Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances, with two members of the committee resigning in protest. A practitioner of Realpolitik, Kissinger played a prominent role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977. During this period, he pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrated the opening of relations with China, engaged in what became known as shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East to end the Yom Kippur War, and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, ending American involvement in the Vietnam War.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Henry Alfred Kissinger Heinz Alfred Kissinger Henry A. Kissinger Heinz Kissinger Kissinger
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Additional quotes by Henry Kissinger

I...was a little puzzled by your suggestion that we should return to a diplomacy like Bismarck's. Having once planned to write a book on Bismarck's diplomacy and, indeed, having finished half of it, I could think of few policies more likely to lead to catastrophe in present circumstances.

Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union.

Nixon was one of the most gifted of American Presidents, prepared to make tough decisions and courageous in doing so. But he needed solitude for such an act. Face-to-face, Nixon was obsessively incapable of overruling an interlocutor or even disagreeing with him.

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