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Top John Lewis Gaddis Quotes

Browse top 21 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by John Lewis Gaddis.

Favorite John Lewis Gaddis Quotes

1. "As my former Yale colleague Rogers Smith has put it: "Elegance is not worth that price." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
2. "I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in some particular part of the past, and the danger of not getting back in time for your orals." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
3. "It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
4. "...They went from regarding these compromises as regrettable to considering them necessary, then normal, then even desirable." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
5. "[I]n the interests of our common tasks, we must sometimes overlook their stupidities," one Soviet official explained in 1973." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
6. "Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because this provided the only excuse "for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
7. "But when Christopher mentioned that he and Talbott had been trying to package post-Cold War policy in a single phrase, Kennan said they shouldn't. "Containment" had been a misleading oversimplification; strategy could not be made to fit a "bumper sticker." The president laughed when Talbott told him what had happened: "that's why Kennan's a great diplomat and scholar but not a politician." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
8. "Estimates of casualties, civilian and military, are notoriously inexact, but it is likely that some 27 million Soviet citizens died as a direct result of the war—roughly 90 times the number of Americans who died. Victory could hardly have been purchased at greater cost: the U.S.S.R. in 1945 was a shattered state, fortunate to have survived. The war, a contemporary observer recalled, was "both the most fearful and the proudest memory of the Russian people."2" ~ John Lewis Gaddis
9. "Stalin's postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
10. "Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan: that the gravest threat to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention, but rather the risk that hunger, poverty, and despair might cause Europeans to vote their own communists into office, who would then obediently serve Moscow's wishes; that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
11. "Their very independence from Great Britain resulted, as Thomas Paine had predicted it would in 1776, from the implausibility that "a Continent [could] be perpetually governed by an island."12" ~ John Lewis Gaddis
12. "The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
13. "And there were no signs whatever of the disagreements among capitalists—or of the Anglo-American war—that Stalin's ideological illusions had led him to expect." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
14. "Despite having built his own movement with little help from Moscow, the new Chinese leader was a dedicated Marxist-Leninist who was more than ready to defer to Stalin as the head of the international communist movement. The new China, he announced in June, 1949, must ally "with the Soviet Union, . . . and with the proletariat and broad masses of the people in all other countries, and form an international united front. . . . We must lean to one side."53" ~ John Lewis Gaddis
15. "Stalin's first move, uncharacteristically, was to apologize to the Chinese comrades for having underestimated them: "Our opinions are not always correct," he told a visiting delegation from Beijing in July, 1949. He then went on, however, to propose the "second front" the Americans had feared: [T]here should be some division of labor between us. . . . The Soviet Union cannot . . . have the same influence [in Asia] as China is in a position to do. . . . By the same token, China cannot have the same influence as the Soviet Union has in Europe. So, for the interests of the international revolution, . . . you may take more responsibility in working in the East, . . . and we will take more responsibility in the West. . . . In a word, this is our unshirkable duty.56" ~ John Lewis Gaddis
16. "From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly, repeatedly, and bloodcurdlingly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. Soviet missile capabilities were so far superior to those of the United States, he insisted, that he could wipe out any American or European city. He would even specify how many missiles and warheads each target might require." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
17. "He insisted on flying to Washington in a new and untested airplane so that its size would intimidate his hosts." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
18. "The overall population of the German Democratic Republic had declined, since 1949, from 19 million to 17 million.51" ~ John Lewis Gaddis
19. "It's not a very nice solution," Kennedy acknowledged, "but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war."54 The president could not resist observing, though, when he himself visited the Berlin Wall in June, 1963, that "we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us." The ugly structure Khrushchev had erected was "the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see."55" ~ John Lewis Gaddis
20. "This is where the capitalists got it right: they were better than the communists at learning from history, because they never bought into any single, sacrosanct, and therefore unchallengeable theory of history." ~ John Lewis Gaddis
21. "The Cold War could have produced a hot war that might have ended human life on the planet. But because the fear of such a war turned out to be greater than all of the differences that separated the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, there was now reason for hope that it would never take place." ~ John Lewis Gaddis

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Desiring"
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

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Ear
Con
Wit
Use
Hey
Hen
America
Cause
Side
State
United
Here
End
States
Per
Communist
Old
Tie
Europe
Ally
West
Sin
Thou
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Rest
Plan
Pen
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Lead
Chin
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