The Cold War Quotes

“Stalin’s postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“The most important one was the belief, which went back to Lenin, that capitalists would never be able to cooperate with one another for very long. Their inherent greediness—the irresistible urge to place profits above politics—would sooner or later prevail, leaving communists with the need only for patience as they awaited their adversaries’ self-destruction.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“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, The Cold War: A New History

“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, The Cold War: A New History

“Enrollments in American colleges tripled between 1955 and 1970, 250% in the Soviet Union, 400% in France, and more than 200% in China by 1965. Gaddis writes, "What governments failed to foresee was that more young people, plus, more education, when combined with a stalemated Cold War, could be a prescription for insurrection. Learning does not easily compartmentalize. How do you prepare students to think for purposes approved by the state, or by their parents, without also equipping them to think for themselves? Youths throughout history had often wished question their elders values. Now, with university educations, their elders had handed them the training to do so. The result was discontent with the world as it was.”
― John Gaddis, The Cold War

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War

“WHAT IF Stalin himself was the problem, though, and communism might be salvaged with different leadership? The men who sought to succeed him all believed the diagnosis to be accurate and the prescription to be appropriate. Each of them set out to liberate Marxism-Leninism from the legacy of Stalinism. They found, though, that the two were inextricably intertwined: that to try to separate one from another risked killing both.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“Stalin fell into the trap the Marshall Plan laid for him, which was to get him to build the wall that would divide Europe.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“These things did not happen simply because Reagan gave a speech or because Orwell wrote a book: the remainder of this book complicates the causation. It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“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, The Cold War: A New History

“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 cannot . . . have the same influence [in Asia] as China is in a position to do. . . . By the same token, China cannot have the same influence as the Soviet Union has in Europe. So, for the interests of the international revolution, . . . you may take more responsibility in working in the East, . . . and we will take more responsibility in the West. . . . In a word, this is our unshirkable duty.56”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“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, The Cold War: A New History

“The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“Estimates of casualties, civilian and military, are notoriously inexact, but it is likely that some 27 million Soviet citizens died as a direct result of the war—roughly 90 times the number of Americans who died. Victory could hardly have been purchased at greater cost: the U.S.S.R. in 1945 was a shattered state, fortunate to have survived. The war, a contemporary observer recalled, was “both the most fearful and the proudest memory of the Russian people.”2”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“You must be strong, dear brothers and sisters… with the strength of faith…. You must be strong with the strength of hope…. You must be strong with love, which is stronger than death…. When we are strong with the Spirit of God, we are also strong with faith in man…. There is therefore no need to fear.89”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War

“With the precedents of Soviet unilateralism in Europe all too clearly in mind, there was no desire within the new Truman administration to see something similar repeated in Northeast Asia. Here, then, the Americans embraced Stalin’s own equation of blood with influence. They had done most of the fighting in the Pacific War. They alone, therefore, would occupy the nation that had started it.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan: that the gravest threat to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention, but rather the risk that hunger, poverty, and despair might cause Europeans to vote their own communists into office, who would then obediently serve Moscow’s wishes; that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“The Bolshevik Revolution, which had happened only a quarter century earlier, had in contrast involved the embrace of concentrated authority as a means of overthrowing class enemies and consolidating a base from which a proletarian revolution would spread throughout the world. Karl Marx claimed, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, that the industrialization capitalists had set in motion was simultaneously expanding and exploiting the working class, which would sooner or later liberate itself. Not content to wait for this to happen, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin sought to accelerate history in 1917 by seizing control of Russia and imposing Marxism on it, even though that state failed to fit Marx’s prediction that the revolution could only occur in an advanced industrial society. Stalin in turn fixed that problem by redesigning Russia to fit Marxist-Leninist ideology: he forced a largely agrarian nation with few traditions of liberty to become a heavily industrialized nation with no liberty at all. As a consequence, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was, at the end of World War II, the most authoritarian society anywhere on the face of the earth.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“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 economy, or the conduct of politics. 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, The Cold War: A New History

“The sign of a good novel is what it can cause its reader to see, even if this lies beyond the author's own vision.”
― John Gaddis, The Cold War

“...They went from regarding these compromises as regrettable to considering them necessary, then normal, then even desirable.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“The ugly structure Khrushchev had erected was “the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War

“Whatever God thought about it, the old dictator’s ghost was not so easily exorcized after all.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“THE COLD WAR changed all of that, with the result that Wilson is remembered today as a prophetic realist, while Lenin’s statues molder in garbage dumps throughout the former communist world.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“Just what Khrushchev intended to do with his Cuban missiles is, even now, unclear: it was characteristic of him not to think things through.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“Without ever having read Clausewitz—at least as far as we know—the president revived that strategist’s great principle that war must be the instrument of politics, rather than the other way around.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“The United States and the Soviet Union are different. . . . America’s new president, Richard Nixon, is a longtime rightist, a leader of the anti-communists there. I like to deal with rightists. They say what they really think—not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.72”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“Secretary of State Acheson had even announced publicly that the American “defensive perimeter” did not extend to South Korea.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

“[I]n the interests of our common tasks, we must sometimes overlook their stupidities,” one Soviet official explained in 1973.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History