Quotes from 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.

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

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

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.

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

Second terms in the White House open the way for second thoughts.

Common sense, in this sense, is like oxygen: the higher you go, the thinner it gets.

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 suffer nothing at all. . . . Big things are won by big dangers.

Assuming stability is one of the ways ruins get made. Resilience accommodates the unexpected.

Stalin's postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order.

The recognition of human insignificance did not, as one might have expected, enhance the role of divine agency in explaining human affairs: it had just the opposite effect. It gave rise to a secular consciousness that, for better or for worse, placed the responsibility for what happens in history squarely on the people who live through history

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.

Learning about the past liberates the learner from oppressions earlier constructions of the past have imposed upon them.

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

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.

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.

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.

Finally, when historians contest interpretations of the past among themselves, they're liberating it in yet another sense: from the possibility that there can be only a single valid explanation of what happened.

A]lthough the past is never completely knowable, it is more knowable than the future.

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 they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.

Stalin fell into the trap the Marshall Plan laid for him, which was to get him to build the wall that would divide Europe.

That's why war--explicitly in Clausewitz, implicitly in Tolstoy--must reflect policy. For when policy reflects war, it's because some high-level hedgehog--a Xerxes, or a Napoleon--has fallen in love with war, making it an end in itself. They'll stop only when they've bled themselves bloodless. And so the culminating points of their offensives are self-defeat.

As my former Yale colleague Rogers Smith has put it: "Elegance is not worth that price.

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.