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John Lewis Gaddis

John Lewis Gaddis Biography

Historian

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“I’ll define that term, for the purposes of this book, as the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities. If you see ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means. Expanding means may attain more ends, but not all ends can be infinite and means never can be. Whatever balance you strike, there’ll be a link between what’s real and what’s imagined: between your current location and your intended destination. You won’t have a strategy until you’ve connected these dots—dissimilar though they are—within the situation in which you’re operating.”

Self ImprovementStrategyDecision MakingGrand Strategy
Book:On Grand Strategy
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“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.”

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Author:John Lewis Gaddis
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“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.”

FirstsPastDangerStudentsParticularPerspectiveResearchMachinesHistoricalGraduatesChaptersSkepticismUtilityBack In TimeTime MachineGraduate StudentsHistorical ResearchLimited Perspective
Book:The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
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