George Frost Kennan

"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. "

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

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

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

"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. "