基辛格對主席和周恩來的評價：
發信站: BBS 未名空間站 (Fri Jun 17 11:45:25 2011, 美東)

對太祖：He left behind a China unified as it had not been for centuries,
with most vestiges of the original regime eliminated, clearing away the
underbrush for reforms never intended by the Chairman. If China remains
united and emerges as a twenty-first-century superpower, Mao may hold, for
many Chinese, the same ambiguous yet respected role in Chinese history as
Qin Shihuang, the Emperor he personally revered: the dynasty-founding
autocrat who dragged China into the next era by conscripting its population
for a massive national exertion, and whose excesses were later acknowledged
by some as a necessary evil.

對周恩來：In some sixty years of public life, I have encountered no more
compelling figure than Zhou Enlai. Short, elegant, with an expressive face
framing luminous eyes, he dominated by exceptional intelligence and capacity
to intuit the intangibles of the psychology of his opposite number.

對比：Mao dominated any gathering; Zhou suffused it. Mao’s passion strove
to overwhelm opposition; Zhou’s intellect would seek to persuade or
outmaneuver it. Mao was sardonic; Zhou penetrating. Mao thought of himself
as a philosopher; Zhou saw his role as an administrator or a negotiator. Mao
was eager to accelerate history; Zhou was content to exploit its currents.
A saying he often repeated was “The helmsman must ride with the waves.”
When they were together, there was no question of the hierarchy, not simply
in the formal sense but in the deeper aspect of Zhou’s extraordinarily
deferential conduct.