Quotations and notes from "The Cold War - A New History" by John Lewis Gaddis
"He{Stalin} acknowledged, in a wistful but revealing comment in 1947, that" {had}"Churchill delayed opening the second front in northern France by a year, the Red Army would have come to France < > {we} toyed with the idea of reaching Paris.""
"Atomic bombs were meant to be dropped, as soon as they were ready, on whatever enemy targets yet remained."
"Truman and his advisors < > encouraged Soviet military officers to tour the ruins of Hiroshima, and allowed them to witness the first postwar tests of the bomb, held in the Pacific in the summer of 1946."
"By 1959, he{Eisenhower} was insisting gloomily that if war came "you might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself.""!!
"The charges made against Khrushchev" < > "on the day his Kremlin colleagues announced their intention to depose him{October 13, 1964}". " He was accused of rudeness, distraction, arrogance, incompetence, nepotism, megalomania, depression, unpredictability, and growing old."!!
On the night of May 9th, 1970, "unable to sleep, the president of the United States{Richard Nixon}, accompanied only by his valet and a driver, slipped out of the White House to try to reason with students maintaining a vigil in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Nixon was nervous to the point of incoherence, rambling on about Churchill, appeasement, surfing, football, his own environmental policies, and the advantages of traveling while young."
"Most experts would probably have agreed", in 1980, that "the global balance of power < > had been tilting in Moscow's favor through most of the 1970s." But "it has long since been clear - and should have been clearer at the time - that the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies were on the path to decline, and that détente was concealing their difficulties."
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Experimental Blog # 184
Quotations and notes from "Strange Rebels - 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century" by Christian Caryl
"As events unfold around us, we interpret what we see through the prism of precedent, and then are amazed when it turns out that our actions never play out the same way twice."
"The upheaval in Iran had an explosive effect on the rest of the Islamic world."
" .. both Washington and Moscow failed to predict the forces that the invasion{of Afganistan in late 1979}would unleash."
"These five stories": the rise of Deng Xiaoping to the "top job" in China, the election of Margaret Thatcher as Britain's prime minister, the choice of Karl Jozef Wojtyla{John Paul II}as the Pope of the Catholic church, the rise of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the leader of Iran, and the "budding Islamists" of Afganistan{who eventually defeated the Soviet invaders}, "have much more in common than at first meets the eye."
"The protagonists of 1979 were, in their own ways, participants in a great backlash against revolutionary overreach."
"Marxism < > was not just an academic theory about historical truth; its adherents believed that they held the key to superior economic management as well."
"Westerners did not know what to make of Khomeini. The leaders of contemporary revolutions were supposed to be flamboyant, strident, perhaps even promiscuous or a bit messy - like Mao or Che or the student activists in Paris or Frankfurt in the 1960s."
"As events unfold around us, we interpret what we see through the prism of precedent, and then are amazed when it turns out that our actions never play out the same way twice."
"The upheaval in Iran had an explosive effect on the rest of the Islamic world."
" .. both Washington and Moscow failed to predict the forces that the invasion{of Afganistan in late 1979}would unleash."
"These five stories": the rise of Deng Xiaoping to the "top job" in China, the election of Margaret Thatcher as Britain's prime minister, the choice of Karl Jozef Wojtyla{John Paul II}as the Pope of the Catholic church, the rise of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the leader of Iran, and the "budding Islamists" of Afganistan{who eventually defeated the Soviet invaders}, "have much more in common than at first meets the eye."
"The protagonists of 1979 were, in their own ways, participants in a great backlash against revolutionary overreach."
"Marxism < > was not just an academic theory about historical truth; its adherents believed that they held the key to superior economic management as well."
"Westerners did not know what to make of Khomeini. The leaders of contemporary revolutions were supposed to be flamboyant, strident, perhaps even promiscuous or a bit messy - like Mao or Che or the student activists in Paris or Frankfurt in the 1960s."
Saturday, July 5, 2014
Experimental Blog # 183
Notes and Quotations from "The Man of Numbers - Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution" by Keith Devlin
"Prior to the thirteenth century < > the only Europeans who were aware of the system{the Hindu-Arabic number system} were < > scholars, who used it solely to do mathematics. < > That state of affairs started to change after 1202", when Leonardo of Pisa completed Liber abbaci, or "Book of calculation".
In 628 Brahmagupta, who lived in Bhillamala northwest India, introduced the number zero in his "mammoth treatise" called "The opening of the universe".
"In addition to its treatment of Hindi-Arabic arithmetic, Liber abbaci covers the beginnings of algebra and some applied mathematics."
"The Hindu-Arabic system took longer to migrate beyond Italy's borders, < > In 1494, the money changers in Frankfurt attempted to prohibit its use just as the Florentines had two centuries earlier .."
"If Shakespeare had not lived, for example, Hamlet would never have been written. In contrast, if Euclid had not proved that there are infinitely many primes, someone else would have."
"Hindu-Arabic arithmetic falls into the category of something waiting to be found."
"Prior to the thirteenth century < > the only Europeans who were aware of the system{the Hindu-Arabic number system} were < > scholars, who used it solely to do mathematics. < > That state of affairs started to change after 1202", when Leonardo of Pisa completed Liber abbaci, or "Book of calculation".
In 628 Brahmagupta, who lived in Bhillamala northwest India, introduced the number zero in his "mammoth treatise" called "The opening of the universe".
"In addition to its treatment of Hindi-Arabic arithmetic, Liber abbaci covers the beginnings of algebra and some applied mathematics."
"The Hindu-Arabic system took longer to migrate beyond Italy's borders, < > In 1494, the money changers in Frankfurt attempted to prohibit its use just as the Florentines had two centuries earlier .."
"If Shakespeare had not lived, for example, Hamlet would never have been written. In contrast, if Euclid had not proved that there are infinitely many primes, someone else would have."
"Hindu-Arabic arithmetic falls into the category of something waiting to be found."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)