George F. Kennan Quotes
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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.
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We are, if territory and population be looked at together, one of the great countries of the world - a monster country, one might say, along with others such as China, India, the recent Soviet Union, and Brazil. And there is a real question as to whether 'bigness' in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.
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Although the Georgian nationalists do not like Stalin, they have every reason to be thankful to him.
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There will be no room, here, for the smug myopia which views American civilization as the final solution to all world problems; which recommends our institutions for universal adoption and turns away with contempt from the serious study of the institutions of peoples whose civilizations may seem to us to be materially less advanced.
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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.
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Fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship.
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The dilemma is this: We all know that this aid cannot materially affect the course of events of China. We are obliged to put the bill before Congress by virtue of our past commitments and of the pressures that exist in favor of aid to China.
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A guest of one's time and not a member of its household.
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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.
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A doctrine is something that pins you down to a given mode of conduct and dozens of situations which you cannot foresee, which is a great mistake in principle. When the word ‘containment’ was used in my ‘X’ article, it was used with relation to a certain situation then prevailing, and as a response to it.
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The best thing we can do if we want the Russians to let us be Americans is to let the Russians be Russian.
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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.
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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.
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I have never been any good at training children or dogs; that is why I am no good at training myself.
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I am like a person who has placed poison in one of two glasses before a person he loves-and looks back upon his act with horror and incredulity-but still does not know from which glass the person will drink.
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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.