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. George F Kennan
The best thing we can do if we want the Russians to let us be Americans is to let the Russians be Russian. George F Kennan
Russia, Russia – unwashed, backward, appealing Russia, so ashamed of your own backwardness, so orientally determined to conceal it from us by clever deceit. George F Kennan
By this I mean that a political society does not live to conduct foreign policy; it would be more correct to say that it conducts foreign policy in order to live. George F Kennan
Reading, in contrast to sitting before the screen, is not a purely passive exercise. The child, particularly one who reads a book dealing with real life, has nothing before it but the hieroglyphics of the printed page. Imagination must do the rest; and imagination is called upon to do it. Not so the television screen. Here everything is spelled out for the viewer, visually, in motion, and in all three dimensions. No effort of imagination is called upon for its enjoyment. George F Kennan