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…

— John Lewis Gaddis

“But when Christopher mentioned that he and Talbott had been trying to package post-Cold War policy in a single phrase, Kennan said…

— John Lewis Gaddis

“Estimates of casualties, civilian and military, are notoriously inexact, but it is likely that some 27 million Soviet citizens died as a…

— John Lewis Gaddis

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

— 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…

— 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

“Their very independence from Great Britain resulted, as Thomas Paine had predicted it would in 1776, from the implausibility that “a Continent…

— John Lewis Gaddis

“Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan: that the gravest threat to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military…

— John Lewis Gaddis

“The Cold War could have produced a hot war that might have ended human life on the planet. But because the fear…

— 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…

— John Lewis Gaddis

“The overall population of the German Democratic Republic had declined, since 1949, from 19 million to 17 million.51”

— John Lewis Gaddis

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

— John Lewis Gaddis

“. . .biographers tend to regard as character those elements of personality that remain constant, or nearly so, throughout. . .Like practitioners…

— John Lewis Gaddis