53 Quotes by George F. Kennan

The general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union,

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?

Russia, Russia-unwashed, backward, appealing Russia, so ashamed of your own backwardness, so orientally determined to conceal it from us by clever deceit.

You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.

A guest of one’s time and not a member of the household.

In the fabric of human events, one thing leads to another. Every mistake is in a sense the product of all the mistakes that have gone before it, from which fact it derives a sort of cosmic forgiveness; and at the same time every mistake is in a sense the determinant of all the mistakes of the future, from which it derives a sort of cosmic unforgiveableness.

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.

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