“Poor old West: succumbing feebly, day by day, to its own decadence, sliding into debility on the slime of its own self-indulgent permissiveness; its drugs, its crime, its pornography, its pampering of the youth, its addication to its bodily comforts, its rampant materialism and consumerism.”
Kennan in a 1976 interview.
“Warfare should be a means to an end other than warfare, an end connected with the beliefs and the feelings and the attitudes of people, an end marked by submission to a new political will and perhaps to a new regime of life, but an end which at least [does] not negate the principle of life itself.”
Kennan to Dean Acheson, 1950.
“My friends, what sort of a world is this in which we are living? Whoever gave us the right, as Christians, to take one innocent human life, much less one hundred and two or a hundred and two thousand? I recall no quantitative stipulation on the Sixth Commandment.”
Kennan, 1959, Princeton University Chapel (repudiating America’s earlier testing of hydrogen bombs).
“The mere experience of participation in government is an unsettling thing…. It arouses and stimulates a whole series of human qualities that have nothing to do with Christian purposes: ambition… greed, envy, competitiveness, the love of public attention, the appetite for flattery. These motivations enter at a thousand points into the final product of any political effort.”
Kennan in a 1969 article for Princeton Seminary Bulletin
“I do not profess to know- I prefer, in fact, to ignore- what is moral and virtuous for the sovereign state of Libya or Viet Nam. And while I should always be interested, as a matter of practical politics, to learn their views on the actions and diplomatic methods of my own country, I should be reluctant to accept instruction from the inhabitants of these states on what is right or what is wrong in the conduct of foreign policy. I should resent, in fact, the suggestion that their traditional concepts ought to be relevant to our problems.”
Kennan, “Morality and Foreign Policy,” 1957.
“I must reject it … and not just as a matter of critical logic, but rather out of a sense of Christian duty, because it implies a certain externalization of evil- a tendency to look for evil only outside ourselves- which is wholly incompatible with Christian teaching. Evil is an omnipresent substance of human life: around us and within us as well as without us …. When we struggle against it we must always regard that struggle as in part an overcoming of self. We cannot, for this reason, identify ourselves self-righteously with all that is good and clothe whatever opposes us in the colors of unmitigated evil.”
George Kennan in 1964, speaking on anti-communism.
“So numerous would be the ramifications of mounting Arab ill will, of opening the door to Soviet political or military penetration, and of generally chaotic conditions in Palestine and neighboring countries that the whole structure of peace and security in the Near East and Mediterranean would be directly or indirectly affected with results… injurious to US interests.”
George Frost Kennan, PPS 19
“The position of [American] Jews would be gravely undermined as it becomes evident to the public that in supporting a Jewish state in Palestine we were infact supporting the extreme objectives of political Zionism, to the detriment of overall US security interests.”
-Kennan, PPS 19, January 1948
“There were many facets of Soviet life that I respected and admired; but I could find little patience for the ideology itself. I saw it as a pseudoscience, replete with artificial heroes and villains; and as much as I admired the Soviet leaders for thewir courage, their determination, and their political seriousness, I could experience only disgust for other features of their political personality: their professed hatred and rejection of large portions of humanity, their abundant cruelties, their claims to infallibility, their opportunism and unscrupulousness of method, their disregard for truth, their conspiratorial secretiveness, and especially the love of power that so often and so obviously lurked behind the pretense of high-minded ideological conviction.”
This diatribe against Soviet ideology was penned by Kennan in his Memoirs, 1925-1950 (published in 1967).
“It is necessary to distinguish clearly between a program for the economic revitalization of Europe on the one hand, and a program of American support of such revitalization on the other. It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally and to promulgate formally on its own initiative a program designed to place western Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The formal initiative must come from Europe; the program must be evolved in Europe; and the Europeans must bear the basic responsibility for it. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of the later support of such a program, by financial and other means, at European request.”
Kennan recommended this path to Dean Acheson through a Policy Planning Staff memo on May 23, 1947.