Top 35 George F Kennan Quotes
#1. The first time I set out to find George F. Kennan, in 1982, I had just turned 21, begun my final semester at Princeton University and noticed with astonishment that the senior thesis deadline had crept to within four months.
Barton Gellman
#2. A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all.
George F. Kennan
#3. The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.
George F. Kennan
#4. A political society does not live to conduct foreign policy; it would be more correct to say that it conducts foreign policy in order to live.
George F. Kennan
#5. Whenever you have a possibility of going in two ways, either for peace or for war, for peaceful methods of for military methods, in the present age there is a strong prejudice for the peaceful ones. War seldom ever leads to good results.
George F. Kennan
#6. Forms of government are forged mainly in the fire of practice, not in the vacuum of theory. They respond to national character and to national realities.
George F. Kennan
#7. One sometimes feels a guest of one's time and not a member of its household.
George F. Kennan
#8. Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.
George F. Kennan
#9. The nuclear bomb is the most useless weapon ever invented. It can be employed to no rational purpose. It is not even an effective defense against itself.
George F. Kennan
#10. It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.
George F. Kennan
#12. The accords were fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship.
George F. Kennan
#13. The Russian leaders are keen judges of human psychology, and as such they are highly conscious that loss of temper and of self-control is never a source of strength in political affairs.
George F. Kennan
#14. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
George F. Kennan
#15. Public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics.
George F. Kennan
#16. Do people ever reflect, one wonders, that the best way to protect against the penetration of one's secrets by others is to have the minimum of secrets to conceal?
George F. Kennan
#17. The Red Army ... swept the native population clean in a manner that has no parallel since the days of the Asiatic hordes.
George F. Kennan
#18. We should not lose ourselves in vainglorious sohemes for changing human nature all over the planet. Rather, we should learn to view ourselves with a sense of proportion and Christian humility before the enormous complexity of the world in which it has been given us to live.
George F. Kennan
#19. Instruments of coercion, once created, have a tendency to find their own natural masters.
George F. Kennan
#20. You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background
George F. Kennan
#21. There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.
George F. Kennan
#22. This is a big world. Billions - rapidly increasing billions - of people live outside our borders. Obviously, a great number of them, being much poorer than they think most of us are, look enviously over those borders and would like, if they could, to come here.
George F. Kennan
#23. World communism is like [a] malignant parasite which feeds on diseased tissue
George F. Kennan
#24. Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly over weapons and communications, ... is simply not a possibility in the modern age.
George F. Kennan
#25. Bearing all this in mind, we see that there is no Russian national understanding which would permit the early establishment in Russia of anything resembling the private enterprise system as we know it.
George F. Kennan
#26. The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.
George F. Kennan
#27. Above all, it behooves us to repress, and if possible to extinguish once and for all, our inveterate tendency to judge others by the extent to which they contrive to be like ourselves.
George F. Kennan
#28. Perfect discipline requires recognition of infallibility. Infallibility requires the observance of discipline.
George F. Kennan
#30. The best thing we can do if we want the Russians to let us be Americans is to let the Russians be Russian.
George F. Kennan
#32. The jealous and intolerant eye of the Kremlin can distinguish, in the end, only vassals and enemies, and the neighbors of Russia, if they do not wish to be one, must reconcile themselves to being the other.
George F. Kennan
#33. It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.
George F. Kennan
#34. Not only the studying and writing of history but also the honoring of it both represent affirmations of a certain defiant faith a desperate, unreasoning faith, if you will but faith nevertheless in the endurance of this threatened world faith in the total essentiality of historical continuity.
George F. Kennan
#35. The United States should not jump around like an elephant frightened by a mouse.
George F. Kennan
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