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" 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. "

Henry Kissinger

Time

Leadership

Live

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" I think that America's recovery of a global strategic view is an absolutely essential element of our foreign policy. "

" I don't see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today. "

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

" While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive. "

" The security of Israel is a moral imperative for all free peoples. "

" The attitude of the West and of Russia towards a crisis like Ukraine is diametrically different. The West is trying to establish the legality of any established border. For Russia, Ukraine is part of the Russian patrimony. "

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" We are all the President's men. "

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" Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision. "

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

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

" 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. "

" A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect. "

" Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction. "

" For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon. "

" The high probability is if American forces withdraw from Afghanistan and if no alternative international arrangement is made that then the historic contests between the regions and the sects will reappear, the Taliban will re-emerge, and a very complicated and maybe chaotic situation will develop. "

" The tragedy of America is that it entered all the wars with a consensus in favor of them, but within a defined period, the legitimacy of the war became a major domestic issue, with some people arguing that withdrawal was the only legitimate objective. "

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

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

" Even a paranoid can have enemies. "

" The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. "

" University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. "

" Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries. But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it's very difficult to communicate about it. Because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they're doing. "

" We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are. "

" My view of my role is that together with like-minded men and women, I could help contribute to a bipartisan view of American engagement in the world for another period; I could do my part to overcome this really, in a way, awful period in which we are turning history into personal recriminations, depriving our political system of a serious debate. "