“ As my former Yale colleague Rogers Smith has put it: Elegance is not worth that price. John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 r… John Lewis Gaddis
“ It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail. John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 perspect… John Lewis Gaddis
“ Whatever God thought about it, the old dictator’s ghost was not so easily exorcized after all. John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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
“ He insisted on flying to Washington in a new and untested airplane so that its size would intimidate his hosts. John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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… John Lewis Gaddis
“ Common sense, in this sense, is like oxygen: the higher you go, the thinner it gets. John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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;… John Lewis Gaddis
“ The United States and the Soviet Union are different. . . . America’s new president, Richard Nixon, is a longtime rightist, a leader of the anti-communists there. I like to deal with rightists. They s… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 Sparta… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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
“ 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 problem… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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, t… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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, re… John Lewis Gaddis
“ It followed that anyone who could strengthen a fortification, repair a boat, power an oar, pay others to do these things, or even bring up a child who might someday do them, would be serving the state… John Lewis Gaddis
“ Joint-stock companies could be similarly flexible. The absence of close control by the British crown in the early stages of colonization, Elliott points out, left considerable latitude for the evoluti… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 d… John Lewis Gaddis
