John Lewis Gaddis Quotes

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

John Lewis Gaddis

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

John Lewis Gaddis

#3. 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.

John Lewis Gaddis

#4. And there were no signs whatever of the disagreements among capitalists - or of the Anglo-American war - that Stalin's ideological illusions had led him to expect.

John Lewis Gaddis

#5. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had been born in revolution. Both embraced ideologies with global aspirations: what worked at home, their leaders assumed, would also do so for the rest of the world.

John Lewis Gaddis

#6. Despite the legacy of slavery, the near extermination of native Americans, and persistent racial, sexual, and social discrimination, the citizens of the United States could plausibly claim, in 1945, to live in the freest society on the face of the earth.

John Lewis Gaddis

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

John Lewis Gaddis

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

John Lewis Gaddis

#9. As my former Yale colleague Rogers Smith has put it: Elegance is not worth that price.

John Lewis Gaddis

#10. 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.

John Lewis Gaddis

#11. 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.

John Lewis Gaddis

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

John Lewis Gaddis

#13. 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.

John Lewis Gaddis

#14. 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