Top 12 Quotes & Sayings by John Lewis Gaddis

If there is one great power, and the great power has taken upon itself the right to preempt and is choosing for itself when and in what circumstances it's going to do that, obviously it leads people in the rest of the world to wonder how far this doctrine extends.

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.

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.

The doctrine of preemption has a long and distinguished history in the history of American foreign policy.

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.

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

George Kennan and Paul Nitze were the Adams and Jefferson of the Cold War. They were there for the beginning, they witnessed its course over almost half a century, and they argued with each other constantly while it was going on. But they maintained throughout a remarkable friendship, demonstrating-as few others in our time have-that it is possible to differ with civility. Nicholas Thompson's is a fine account of that relationship, carefully researched, beautifully written, and evocatively suggestive of how much we have lost because such civility has become so rare.

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.

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

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