Quotes from John Lewis Gaddis

he started out with relatively little. He was born into the family of a respectable but forgettable Roman senator in 63 B.C.E.

We know the future only by the past we project into it.

Lenin had no such qualms: The masses were too stupid and too blind to be allowed to proceed in the direction of their own choosing. . . . [T]hey could only be saved by being ruthlessly ordered by leaders who had acquired a capacity for knowing how to organize the liberated slaves into a rational planned system.

They also reflect, at this relatively early stage in Kennan's career, one of his most persistent paradoxes: that he understood the Soviet Union far better than he did the United States.

to depict reality - that is as much an artistic vision as a scientific sensibility

The issue for historians , then, is not whether we should make moral judgments, but how we can do so responsibly, by which I mean in such a way as to convince both the professionals and non-professionals who'll read our work that what we say makes sense.

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, the Americans embraced Stalin's own equation of blood with influence. They had done most of the fighting in the Pacific War. They alone, therefore, would occupy the nation that had started it.

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 its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War.

Statesmen of this type know what to do and when to do it, if they are to achieve their ends, which themselves are usually not born within some private world of inner thought, or introverted feeling, but are the crystallisation, the raising to great intensity and clarity, of what a large number of their fellow citizens are thinking and feeling in some dim, inarticulate but nevertheless persistent fashion.

todo lo que puede ocurrir, pero es audaz

Xerxes tinha razão. Se tentarmos prever tudo, arriscamo-nos a não fazer nada. Mas também a tinha Artabano. Se não nos prepararmos para tudo o que pode acontecer, garantimos que alguma parte disso acontecerá.

Los grandes ejércitos transportan consigo lo necesario para asegurarse de que lo que pudiera ir mal no vaya

The test of a good theory lies in its ability to explain the past, for only if it does can we trust what it may tell us about the future.

From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly, repeatedly, and bloodcurdlingly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. Soviet missile capabilities were so far superior to those of the United States, he insisted, that he could wipe out any American or European city. He would even specify how many missiles and warheads each target might require.

the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."21

He insisted on flying to Washington in a new and untested airplane so that its size would intimidate his hosts.

Scale sets the ranges within which experience accrues. If, in evolution, edges of chaos reward adaptation; if, in history, adaptation fortifies resilience; and if, in individuals, resilience accommodates unknowns

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.

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.

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 of history.

It's long been assumed that Machiavelli is in Hell and -worse- content to be there

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, recovery took precedence over everything else.

The Cold War could have produced a hot war that might have ended human life on the planet. But because the fear of such a war turned out to be greater than all of the differences that separated the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, there was now reason for hope that it would never take place.

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