Site uses cookies to provide basic functionality.

OK
Search Quotes tags
Query
Tags
Author
1 2 3 ▲ ▼
Link Quote Stars Tags Author
603ef32 Historical consciousness therefore leaves you, as does maturity itself, with a simultaneous sense of your own significance and insignificance. Like Friedrich's wanderer, you dominate a landscape even as you're diminished by it. You're suspended between sensibilities that are at odds with one another, but it's precisely within that suspension that your own identity--whether as a person or a historian--tends to reside. Self-doubt must always .. John Lewis Gaddis
ac73515 biographers tend to regard as character those elements of personality that remain constant, or nearly so, throughout. . .Like practitioners of fractal geometry, biographers seek patterns that persist as one moves from micro- to macro-levels of analysis, and back again. . . . It follows from this that the scale across which we seek similarity need not be chronological. Consider the following incidents in the life of Stalin between 1929 and 1.. John Lewis Gaddis
f9d9a97 Common sense, in this sense, is like oxygen: the higher you go, the thinner it gets. John Lewis Gaddis
8c8214e Assuming stability is one of the ways ruins get made. Resilience accommodates the unexpected. John Lewis Gaddis
9b9ad93 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. time-machine John Lewis Gaddis
e3cde26 Despite the legacy of slavery, the near extermination of native Americans, and persistent racial, sexual, and social discrimination, the citizens of the United States could plausibly claim, in 1945, to live in the freest society on the face of the earth. John Lewis Gaddis
fad74df Both the United States and the Soviet Union had been born in revolution. Both embraced ideologies with global aspirations: what worked at home, their leaders assumed, would also do so for the rest of the world. John Lewis Gaddis
61fc685 The most important one was the belief, which went back to Lenin, that capitalists would never be able to cooperate with one another for very long. Their inherent greediness--the irresistible urge to place profits above politics--would sooner or later prevail, leaving communists with the need only for patience as they awaited their adversaries' self-destruction. John Lewis Gaddis
9dbbedf Stalin's postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order. John Lewis Gaddis
7918ea9 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
c782552 if you were to take account of everything . . . , you would never do anything. It is better to have a brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to [calculate] all of the terrors and suffer nothing at all. . . . Big things are won by big dangers. John Lewis Gaddis
5bac090 As my former Yale colleague Rogers Smith has put it: "Elegance is not worth that price." social-sciences modeling simulation John Lewis Gaddis
e212190 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.. John Lewis Gaddis
5870876 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
a104260 The recognition of human insignificance did not, as one might have expected, enhance the role of divine agency in explaining human affairs: it had just the opposite effect. It gave rise to a secular consciousness that, for better or for worse, placed the responsibility for what happens in history squarely on the people who live through history John Lewis Gaddis
72730cf They went from regarding these compromises as regrettable to considering them necessary, then normal, then even desirable. John Lewis Gaddis
73438d9 F. Scott Fitzgerald's test, from 1936, for a first-rate intelligence: "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." -- John Lewis Gaddis
38a5a13 One day I asked what connection Prince Andrei, Natasha, and the bumbling Pierre could possibly have to their very different lives? There was, as at Newport, a moment of silence. Then three students simultaneously said the same thing: "They make us feel less lonely." Thucydides wouldn't have put it in that way, but I suspect this is what he meant when he encouraged his readers to seek "knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of .. John Lewis Gaddis
4b7d7be Berlin failed to illuminate much with it beyond Tolstoy. The great man had wanted to be a hedgehog, Berlin claimed: War and Peace was supposed to reveal the laws by which history worked. But Tolstoy was too honest to neglect the peculiarities of personality and the contingencies of circumstance that defy such generalizations. So he filled his masterpiece with some of the most fox-like writing in all literature, mesmerizing his readers, who .. John Lewis Gaddis
e4d8d3b Well, no, if we're really honest with ourselves, most of us wouldn't, even in this more politically correct age. For satisfying the claims of justice in this instance would not only disrupt the present and future, but also the past: wouldn't the Mexicans then have to give it all back to the Spanish, and then the Spanish to the indigenous populations they decimated, and then those peoples to the flora and fauna they displaced after crossing .. John Lewis Gaddis
fac8b54 And, hence, to manage it. For if, as Thucydides warned two thousand years earlier, words in crises can lose their meaning, leaving in the "ability to see all sides of a question [an] incapacity to act on any,"82" John Lewis Gaddis
3a3cbf1 You must be strong, dear brothers and sisters... with the strength of faith.... You must be strong with the strength of hope.... You must be strong with love, which is stronger than death.... When we are strong with the Spirit of God, we are also strong with faith in man.... There is therefore no need to fear.89 John Lewis Gaddis
c06749f Neither Xerxes nor Artabanus, therefore, would have passed F. Scott Fitzgerald's test, from 1936, for a first-rate intelligence: "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." 21 Fitzgerald may have intended nothing more than a reproach to himself. His writing career had stalled by then, and four years later he would die, of alcoholism, heart disease, and an obscurity made all.. John Lewis Gaddis
a105444 His first decision was to return to Rome without knowing who was in charge or how he'd be received. The stakes skyrocketed when he learned, after landing near Brundisium, that Caesar's will had made him an heir and--by adoption--a son. He reached the capital as Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, 9 and out of respect for their martyred leader the legions he encountered took his new status seriously. Octavian could have blown the opportunity by .. John Lewis Gaddis
98daae5 Steven Spielberg's 2012 film Lincoln is dramatization at its best. It shows the president, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, trying to make good on the claim, in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal: what more praiseworthy cause could a hedgehog possibly pursue? But to abolish slavery, Lincoln must move the Thirteenth Amendment through a fractious House of Representatives, and here his maneuvers are as foxy as they come.. John Lewis Gaddis
43a7db6 The future we can't know, other than that it will originate in the past but then depart from it. Thucydides' distinction between resemblance and reflection--between patterns surviving across time and repetitions degraded by time--aligns the asymmetry, for it suggests that the past prepares us for the future only when, however imperfectly, it transfers. Just as capabilities restrict aspirations to what circumstances will allow. To know one b.. John Lewis Gaddis
3ee97cf 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 .. John Lewis Gaddis
eb99cab The Corinthians began by blaming the Spartans for the Athenian long walls. Their "bluntness of perception" had allowed Themistocles' trickery decades earlier, from which Athens concluded that the Spartans "see, but do not care." You, Spartans, of all the Hellenes are alone inactive, and defend yourselves not by doing anything but by looking as if you would do something; you alone wait till the power of an enemy is becoming twice its origina.. John Lewis Gaddis
ab67f21 The Greeks thought of culture as character. It was predictability across scale: the behavior of a city, a state, or a people in small things, big things, and those in between. 32 Knowing who they were and what they wanted, the Spartans were wholly predictable. They saw no need to change themselves or anyone else. The Athenians' strategy of walling their cities, however, had reshaped their character, obliging them restlessly to roam the worl.. John Lewis Gaddis
dc198d2 These things did not happen simply because Reagan gave a speech or because Orwell wrote a book: the remainder of this book complicates the causation. It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail. John Lewis Gaddis
44eff6f But perhaps a compromise lies where Augustine's checklists leave you, when you do have room to maneuver. You lean, bend, or tilt in a certain direction when choosing between order and justice, war and peace, Caesar and God. You're aligning aspirations with capabilities, for in Augustine's thinking justice, peace, and God fit the first category, while order, war, and Caesar inhabit the second. Alignment, in turn, implies interdependence. Jus.. John Lewis Gaddis
523019b Reassuring withdrawals, Clausewitz writes in On War, "are very rare." More often armies and nations fail to distinguish orderly disengagements from abject capitulations--or foresight from fear." John Lewis Gaddis
1347f83 It's all the more interesting, then, that Augustus understood so much of Sun Tzu while knowing nothing of him. The explanation may lie in a logic of strategy that undergirds cultures--much as grammar does languages--over vast stretches of time, space, and scale. If so, common sense, when confronting uncommon circumstances, may itself be another of the contradictions held simultaneously in the minds of first-rate intelligences. For the pract.. John Lewis Gaddis
0c8ef6d Both this saint and this sinner, then, see proportionality as a pathway. For Augustine, it shows rulers, however deeply into iniquity they may have descended, the way back from the City of Man to the City of God. Machiavelli doesn't imagine communities "that have never been seen or known to exist," 52 but he does seek virtu, by which he means doing what's required when facing necessity but not in all respects at its mercy. It's here that he.. John Lewis Gaddis
67df09c goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy," he admonished the House of Representatives in a speech of his own on July 4, 1821: She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. . . . She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners, . . . she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice,.. John Lewis Gaddis
c9b2d90 His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within "neat, geometric patterns" that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was "like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experience.. John Lewis Gaddis
7d5a2e4 Why, then, did the Americans invest so much in Vietnam when, in comparison with the whole of their interests at the time, so little was at stake there? Thucydidean resemblances, I think, suggest an answer. Megara might look like a trifle, Pericles told the Athenians in 432 B.C.E., but if they yielded on that small matter "you will instantly have to meet some greater demand." "Without the United States," John F. Kennedy warned a Texas audien.. John Lewis Gaddis
688ef66 That's why war--explicitly in Clausewitz, implicitly in Tolstoy--must reflect policy. For when policy reflects war, it's because some high-level hedgehog--a Xerxes, or a Napoleon--has fallen in love with war, making it an end in itself. They'll stop only when they've bled themselves bloodless. And so the culminating points of their offensives are self-defeat. John Lewis Gaddis
075a02e I have the body but of a weak, feeble woman," she told her troops as the Spanish Armada sailed for home in 1588, "but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too." Relishing opposites, the queen was constant only in her patriotism, her insistence on keeping ends within means, and her determination--a requirement for pivoting--never to be pinned down. 38 Her hopes for religion reflected this. Knowing the upheavals he.. John Lewis Gaddis
dc869be The subject speaks its own importance," Hamilton announced in the first essay's first paragraph, "comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world." For it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, .. John Lewis Gaddis
c203856 Which somehow made it appropriate that The Federalist's hardest task--showing how a republic could be an empire without becoming a tyranny--fell to Madison, the most easily underestimated of the American Founders. 63 He fulfilled it, triumphantly, by connecting time, space, and scale. History had shown "instability, injustice, and confusion" always to have extinguished "popular governments," Madison wrote in the tenth Publius essay. Indepen.. John Lewis Gaddis
1ce6186 The American republic now extended across a third of a continent, and was unlikely to stop there. How then could the British time bomb of generosity--the ocean of land ceded in 1783--fail to revive familiar protests of "no taxation without representation"? Where, if that happened, would Hamilton's "UNION" be? Madison solved these issues of time and space by shifting scale. In doing so he drew, knowingly or not, 65 on Machiavelli. For only i.. John Lewis Gaddis
ced4fc9 If that's the case, though, why did the Union, under Lincoln, so catastrophically fail? The easy answer might be that no strategy anticipates all contingencies, that every solution creates new problems, and that these can, at times, overwhelm. The harsher one--although I think the more accurate one--lies in the possibility that the Founders left the Union to test itself: knowing the need to proportion aspirations to capabilities, recognizin.. John Lewis Gaddis
bdd18fc That's because checklists adapt better to change than commandments. Sailors rely on them before going to sea. Soldiers employ them in planning missions. Surgeons demand them, to make sure they'll have the instruments they need and that they'll leave none behind. Pilots run through them, to ensure taking off safely and landing smoothly--preferably at the intended airport. Parents deploy them against all that can go wrong in transporting smal.. John Lewis Gaddis
1 2 3 ▲ ▼