Arthur Herman Quotes

(Rejection of the racial equality clause was a particularly bitter grievance for members of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and their spokesman, W. E. B. Du Bois.)

if any one factor had kept the Entente nations able not only to fight the war but also to mount one massive offensive after another, it was America's contribution to their war effort, even though the United States remained neutral.

the United States, led by Wall Street, was becoming entangled financially in the fate of the Entente. Defeat of France, Britain, and Russia could mean their default on their debts; default by the Entente would almost certainly mean bankruptcy for America's leading investment firms, not to mention the corporations that depended on the growing transatlantic business between the United States, the Allies, and their chief entrepôt, the port of London.

A. J. P. Taylor who said that the historian's inevitable task is to decide whether something that happened in history was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.

peace without victory for the right; a peace designed to let wrong triumph; a peace championed in neutral countries by the apostles of timidity and greed.

never in history, past or present, had an autocratic regime handed over power with so little upheaval or bloodshed.

Joffre himself had done nothing to change his strategy, which was attack, attack, attack, regardless of the losses or, incredibly, without any substantive sign of success. Instead, Joffre had watched impassively as the French casualties mounted.

Wilson worried that the Constitution itself would not survive: "a nation can't put its strength into a war and keep its head level; it has never been done."13

Kerensky. He was deeply committed to Russia's continuing the war — one reason the other Entente powers should have been eager to support him. But Kerensky did have one weakness that would ultimately prove fatal. As Russia was headed on its revolutionary course from autocracy to constitutional democracy, Kerensky fully expected there would be those who would try to derail its new destiny — but he assumed they would come from Russia's pro-czarist right, not from his supposed allies on the left. All his reading of history, especially the history of the French Revolution, had led him to this conclusion: what revolutions had to fear most was counterrevolution by those trying to reverse direction.

Petrograd (St. Petersburg's new name since the outbreak of war, when the government decided that "St. Petersburg" sounded Teutonic)

One could say that Aristotle had turned Plato on his head. Instead of the individual being a pale copy of a more real abstract form, the universal is less real (indeed only a copy) of the individual.15 This reversal left Aristotle's philosophy with a built-in bias in favor of the individual: in science, in metaphysics, in ethics, and later in politics.

It was not the last time a well-meaning American Progressive would express the view that if only we made our good intentions plain, the opposition of our foes would melt away.

Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests," he continued. "Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy

If power truly comes from the barrel of a gun, to borrow a phrase from a later master of the dual state, Mao Zedong, Lenin still had his finger on the trigger, especially in the capital. His best bet, however, was to defuse the authority of the Constituent Assembly before it even met.

the first meeting of the Assembly was put off until early January, but not before Lenin had its most conservative party, the Kadet Party, outlawed as "enemies of the people."