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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| caab33d | We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing." Athenians found "the fruits of other countries" to be "as familiar a luxury as those of [their] own." The walls made their citizenship global." | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 9e04b3e | The alternative Kennan described as the "particularized" approach. It was "skeptical of any scheme for compressing international affairs into legalist concepts. It holds that the content is more important than the form, and will force its way through any formal structure which is placed upon it. It considers that the thirst for power is still dominant among so many peoples that it cannot be assuaged or controlled by anything but counter-for.. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| ce12191 | an atmosphere of lies and distortions, in other words, of which the very essence is the unceasing effort to induce people to abandon the evidence of their senses and of all objective criteria and to accept as valid a version of reality artificially created, unconnected with objective fact, and calculated to reduce them to a state in which no reactions are operative but those of fear and respect for the mysteries of Soviet power. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 6983c22 | safety depends," Kennan told a National War College audience in December 1948, on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world: To put them where necessary one against the other; to see that they spend in conflict with each other, if they must spend it at all, the intolerance and violence and fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us, that they are thus compelled to cancel each other.. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| e62c1b8 | The danger for Americans lay less in another Pearl Harbor than in what they might do to themselves because they feared one. For confronting totalitarians required, in many respects, emulating them. The leader who would attempt this "must learn to regiment his people, to husband his resources, to guard against hostile agents in his midst, to maintain formidable armed forces in peacetime, to preserve secrecy about governmental decisions, to w.. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| a832f31 | I]n the interests of our common tasks, we must sometimes overlook their stupidities," one Soviet official explained in 1973." -- | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| ec9bc7a | Stalin fell into the trap the Marshall Plan laid for him, which was to get him to build the wall that would divide Europe. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 95e7fe8 | Just what Khrushchev intended to do with his Cuban missiles is, even now, unclear: it was characteristic of him not to think things through. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| f597d15 | 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 | ||
| e476526 | 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 | ||
| 687ab77 | He almost whipped the art out of me. | Augusta Savage | ||
| 469c407 | Thanks to an ingenious constitution, their geographical isolation from potential rivals, and a magnificent endowment of natural resources, the Americans managed to build an extraordinarily powerful state, a fact that became obvious during World War II. They accomplished this, however, by severely restricting their government's capacity to control everyday life, whether through the dissemination of ideas, the organization of the economy, or .. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| a8b6ea2 | The Bolshevik Revolution, which had happened only a quarter century earlier, had in contrast involved the embrace of concentrated authority as a means of overthrowing class enemies and consolidating a base from which a proletarian revolution would spread throughout the world. Karl Marx claimed, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, that the industrialization capitalists had set in motion was simultaneously expanding and exploiting the working.. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| dc7c592 | THE COLD WAR changed all of that, with the result that Wilson is remembered today as a prophetic realist, while Lenin's statues molder in garbage dumps throughout the former communist world. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| e264509 | 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 t.. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 8f595a0 | John Lewis Gaddis had come to visit shortly before the election and over lunch said something that resonated with me. "Never forget how really dependent the world is on America. And they know it." | Condoleezza Rice | ||
| 4f5a7ff | 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 | ||
| 212e1fb | WHAT IF Stalin himself was the problem, though, and communism might be salvaged with different leadership? The men who sought to succeed him all believed the diagnosis to be accurate and the prescription to be appropriate. Each of them set out to liberate Marxism-Leninism from the legacy of Stalinism. They found, though, that the two were inextricably intertwined: that to try to separate one from another risked killing both. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 7de6c3b | 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.. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| e564ac0 | I can't take communism nor can you, but to cross this bridge I would hold hands with the Devil. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 4075657 | He insisted on flying to Washington in a new and untested airplane so that its size would intimidate his hosts. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| ada4781 | The overall population of the German Democratic Republic had declined, since 1949, from 19 million to 17 million.51 | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 52e340f | Without ever having read Clausewitz--at least as far as we know--the president revived that strategist's great principle that war must be the instrument of politics, rather than the other way around. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| a2696b1 | 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 a.. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 824cb41 | 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 | ||
| f39277e | 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 | ||
| 49b22f7 | Whatever God thought about it, the old dictator's ghost was not so easily exorcized after all. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 8c3fcd9 | Complexity fully rendered would take too long and contain too much, thereby entangling judgment. Complexity as what you want or expect would only confirm what you think you know. You need something in between. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| c519862 | Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| a315f6b | With the precedents of Soviet unilateralism in Europe all too clearly in mind, there was no desire within the new Truman administration to see something similar repeated in Northeast Asia. Here, then, the Americans embraced Stalin's own equation of blood with influence. They had done most of the fighting in the Pacific War. They alone, therefore, would occupy the nation that had started it. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 5fb0de1 | 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 | ||
| 59d6efd | Its most memorable scene takes place in the piazza at Cesena early one morning in 1502, where the local governor, Remirro de Orco, is found in two pieces, with a bloody knife and a block of wood between them. "The ferocity of the spectacle," Machiavelli recalls, "left the people at once satisfied and stupefied." Cesare Borgia had made Remirro the governor of Romagna with instructions to pacify the rebellious province. This he did, but so br.. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 5fd6e6c | 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 | ||
| e22c5ed | 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." | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| bc5bc62 | After becoming president in 1933, however, this Roosevelt did insist on putting America first. With its banks collapsing, a fourth of its workforce unemployed, and its self-confidence badly shaken, recovery took precedence over everything else. | John Lewis Gaddis | ||
| 18c869a | To understand a science it is necessary to know its history. | Auguste Comte | ||
| 91ca079 | The dead govern the living. | Auguste Comte | ||
| 86f80b2 | Foreknowledge is power. | Auguste Comte | ||
| 3e90479 | Slowness is a beauty | Auguste Rodin | ||
| dc686a1 | Now to the great artist, everything in nature has character. | Auguste Rodin | ||
| 6bb5a25 | the art critic Cremer reminds Wyatt of Degas's remark "that the artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed" -- | Steven Moore | ||
| 3772222 | If we believe that love is weakness? And people resent it, because they think it's an admission of weakness, they draw away from it... and that's why you kill the thing you love, because it's your weakness personified. If you kill it, you will your weakness before it kills you. | weakness | William Gaddis | |
| ef2342f | I envy Christ, he had a disease named after him | Steven Moore | ||
| 4e6ab61 | If we believe that love is weakness? And people resent it, because they think it's an admission of weakness, they draw away from it... and that's why you kill the thing you love, because it's your weakness personified. If you kill it, you will kill your weakness before it kills you. | William Gaddis |