History Quote by John Lewis Gaddis

“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.” quote by John Lewis Gaddis — Download Open image

““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.””

John Lewis Gaddis

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History Learning From History

More by John Lewis Gaddis

“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

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

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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

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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

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“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

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

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“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

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

John Lewis Gaddis

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“I can’t take communism nor can you, but to cross this bridge I would hold hands with the Devil.”

John Lewis Gaddis

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“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

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“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

“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

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More History quotes

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat…

Simon Schama

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It is said that history turns on small hinges. A human career, too, results from an accumulating series of decisions about large and small…

Norman Vincent Peale

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The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another day just like today, and there will never be another just like it again. Today is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will…

Frederick Buechner

The NBA is my history.

Penny Hardaway

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History has often showed us the strength of the forces that are unleashed by the yearning for freedom. It moved people to overcome their fears and openly confront dictators such as in East Germany and Eastern Europe about 22 years ago... The yearning for freedom cannot be contained by walls for long. It was this yearning that brought down the…

Angela Merkel

We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what…

John Dryden

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What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.

Jean Cocteau

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Things live and die, and then someone processes them into edible portions. This is a complete telling of the story, 'Food.' The basic plot…

David Fahrenthold

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History is a certain way, but you just change the point of view a little bit, and you discover a whole new side of…

Allison Schroeder

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We're at a point in history were we have to become a part of the neighborhood of inhabited planets, like a neighborhood of a community, which we have not even acknowledged that that community exists up until this point.

Edgar Mitchell