George F. Kennan
George F. Kennan
George Frost Kennanwas an American diplomat and historian. He was known best as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War on which he later reversed himself. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth16 February 1904
CountryUnited States of America
George F. Kennan quotes about
people secret atheism
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?
thinking numbers people
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.
men two people
...there is an optimal balance, depending on the manner of man's life, between the density of human population and the tolerances of nature. This balance, in the case of the United States would seem to me to have been surpassed when the American population reached, at a very maximum, two hundred million people, and perhaps a good deal less.
running country people
It is obviously easier, for the short run, to draw cheap labor from adjacent pools of poverty...than to find it among one's own people. And to the millions of such prospective immigrants from poverty to prosperity, there is, rightly or wrongly, no place that looks more attractive than the United States. Given its head, and subject to no restrictions, this pressure will find its termination only when the levels of overpopulation and poverty in the United States are equal to those of the countries from which these people are now so anxious to escape.
people generations records
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.
fig leaves
The accords were fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship.
procedures figs democratic
Fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship.
perfect discipline recognition
Perfect discipline requires recognition of infallibility. Infallibility requires the observance of discipline.
character reality government
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.
judging tendencies relation
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.
loss self judging
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.
russia understanding mind
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.
seductive childhood promise
I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes and places qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror for which there was no external evidence visible or plausible to others. My world was peopled with mysteries, seductive hints, vague menaces, "intimations of immortality.
morning clever sleep
Russia, Russia unwashed, backward, appealing Russia, so ashamed of your own backwardness, so orientally determined to conceal it from us by clever deceit. So sensitive and so suspicious in the face of the wicked, civilized west. I shall always remember you slyly, touchingly, but with great shouting and confusion pumping hot water into our sleeping car in the frosty darkness of a December morning in order that we might not know, in order that we might never realize, to how primitive a land we had come.