John Lewis Gaddis Quotes & Sayings

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-force." Particularism would not reject the idea of joining with other governments to preserve world order, but to be effective such alliances would have to be based "upon real community of interest and outlook, which is to be found only among limited groups of governments, and not upon the abstract formalism of universal international law or international organization. — 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 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. — John Lewis Gaddis

George W. Bush has much to evaluate: he has presided over the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. — John Lewis Gaddis

I think the way to think about the impact of Hiroshima is to think about it as a sudden shift in the balance of power. — John Lewis Gaddis

I don't think there is necessarily a contradiction between being a hegemonic power on the one hand and functioning multilaterally on the other. — John Lewis Gaddis

George Kennan and Paul Nitze were the Adams and Jefferson of the Cold War. They were there for the beginning, they witnessed its course over almost half a century, and they argued with each other constantly while it was going on. But they maintained throughout a remarkable friendship, demonstrating-as few others in our time have-that it is possible to differ with civility. Nicholas Thompson's is a fine account of that relationship, carefully researched, beautifully written, and evocatively suggestive of how much we have lost because such civility has become so rare. — 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, to live in the freest society on the face of the earth. — John Lewis Gaddis

If there is one great power, and the great power has taken upon itself the right to preempt and is choosing for itself when and in what circumstances it's going to do that, obviously it leads people in the rest of the world to wonder how far this doctrine extends. — John Lewis Gaddis

The United States came out of the 1990s, if anything, in an even greater position of hegemony and preeminence than it was at the beginning of the 1990s. — John Lewis Gaddis

The doctrine of preemption has a long and distinguished history in the history of American foreign policy. — 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 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 precede self-confidence. It should never, however, cease to accompany, challenge, and by these means discipline self-confidence. — John Lewis Gaddis

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

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

It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail. — John Lewis Gaddis

Revisionism is a healthy historiographical process, and no one, not even revisionists, should be exempt from it. — 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

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

Second terms in the White House open the way for second thoughts. — John Lewis Gaddis

As my former Yale colleague Rogers Smith has put it: Elegance is not worth that price. — John Lewis Gaddis