29 Quotes by John Lewis Gaddis

It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.

It's here, I think, that science, history, and art have something in common: they all depend on metaphor, on the recognition of patterns, on the realization that something is "like" something else.

The issue for historians , then, is not whether we should make moral judgments, but how we can do so responsibly, by which I mean in such a way as to convince both the professionals and non-professionals who'll read our work that what we say makes sense.

[A]lthough the past is never completely knowable, it is more knowable than the future.

We know the future only by the past we project into it.

As my former Yale colleague Rogers Smith has put it: "Elegance is not worth that price.

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.

Precisely because [historians'] detachment from and elevation above the landscape of the past, historians are able to manipulate time and space in ways they never could manage as normal people. They can compress these dimensions, expand them, compare them, measure them, and even transcend them, almost as poets, playwrights, novelists, and film-makers do. Historians have always been, in this sense, abstractionists: the literal representation of reality is not their task.

Second terms in the White House open the way for second thoughts.