“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… — John Lewis Gaddis Copy Share Image
“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 June, 1963, that “we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.” The… — John Lewis Gaddis Copy Share
The United States came out of the 1990s, if anything, in an even greater position of hegemony and preeminence than it was at the… — John Lewis Gaddis Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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… — John Lewis Gaddis Copy Share Image
“Stalin’s first move, uncharacteristically, was to apologize to the Chinese comrades for having underestimated them: “Our opinions are not always correct,” he told a visiting delegation from Beijing in July, 1949. He then went on, however, to propose the “second front” the Americans had feared: [T]here should be some division of labor between us. . . . The Soviet Union… — John Lewis Gaddis Copy Share
I think the way to think about the impact of Hiroshima is to think about it as a sudden shift in the balance of… — John Lewis Gaddis Copy Share Image
“Thanks to an ingenious constitution, their geographical isolation from potential rivals, and a magnificent endowment of natural resources, the Americans managed to build an extraordinarily powerful state, a fact that became obvious during World War II. They accomplished this, however, by severely restricting their government’s capacity to control everyday life, whether through the dissemination of ideas, the organization of the… — John Lewis Gaddis Copy Share
Second terms in the White House open the way for second thoughts. — John Lewis Gaddis Copy Share Image
“I can’t take communism nor can you, but to cross this bridge I would hold hands with the Devil.” — John Lewis Gaddis Copy Share Image
“From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly, repeatedly, and bloodcurdlingly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. Soviet missile capabilities were so far superior to those… — John Lewis Gaddis Copy Share Image
“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… — John Lewis Gaddis Copy Share
“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 world within "neat, geometric patterns" that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how… — John Lewis Gaddis Copy Share
