George Frost Kennan

One sometimes feels a guest of one's time and not a member of its household.

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.

The accords were fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship.

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.

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.

The best thing we can do if we want the Russians to let us be Americans is to let the Russians be Russian.