“ 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,… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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
“ 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. Th… John Lewis Gaddis
“ Self-interest would become comfort and then affinity. Transparency, for this reason, was vital: We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 importan… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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
“ It was, as Berlin remembered it: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. 2 The passage survives only as a fragment, so its context has long been lost. But the Renaissance scho… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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… John Lewis Gaddis
“ . .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 persi… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 wo… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 w… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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
“ 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… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 o… John Lewis Gaddis
“ The outcome defied categories. 46 Was it a victory for principle or expediency? For the rights of man or the rules of statecraft? For lightness of being or heaviness of hand? For a republic or, as Was… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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 fami… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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… John Lewis Gaddis
“ 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
