“ 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
“ The overall population of the German Democratic Republic had declined, since 1949, from 19 million to 17 million.51 John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 me… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 presen… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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… John Lewis Gaddis
“ I can’t take communism nor can you, but to cross this bridge I would hold hands with the Devil. John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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
“ Whatever their contradictions, Americans were consistent, before and after their first revolution, in deeply distrusting government. Having been left on their own for so long, the colonists saw as sin… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 prepa… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 an… John Lewis Gaddis
“ It’s no stretch to say, then, that Thucydides coaches all who read him. For as his greatest modern interpreter (himself a sometime coach) has gently reminded us, the Greeks, despite their antiquity, m… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 America… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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… John Lewis Gaddis
“ Stalin’s postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order. John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 Jun… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 oppo… John Lewis Gaddis
“ Assuming stability is one of the ways ruins get made. Resilience accommodates the unexpected. John Lewis Gaddis
