Arthur Herman Quotes

In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: 'Proletarians of all countries, unite!' "31

The U.S. president's consent to the Versailles Treaty did more to damage his reputation among his fellow liberals than anything else he did that crucial year. It also sowed the seeds for a bitterness among Germans that would ripen into the political movement that led to Adolf Hitler and World War II.

Mandates were largely a fiction, of course. The distinction between "mandate" and "colony," especially in highly colonized Africa, was meaningless. But the idea provided a fig leaf for Wilson's insistence that the Paris conference not become the tool of European imperialism. France and Britain accepted Wilson's phony compromise.

In a single day, the Allies' entire financial support network hovered on the brink of collapse. It had all been Wilson's doing, the response to a note he had sent to the Federal Reserve shortly before the election. The president was determined not to let America's financial entanglement with the Allies' cause draw it further into support of their war effort.

Marx's well-worn dictum that the capitalist will sell you the rope you use to hang him with.

For Lenin, “self-determination” was a clarion call not for democracy and freedom but for revolt and bloodshed that would rock the capitalist imperialist order down to its foundations.

In Wilson's view, America's neutrality was a reflection of strength, moral strength, rather than weakness or timidity. His other slogan in 1916, besides "He Kept Us Out of War," was "Too Proud to Fight.

Theodore Roosevelt was less impressed. He wrote that "peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight" — a sideways shot at Wilson's manhood and his naïveté. Roosevelt also reminded Americans that in 1776 it was the Tories, the loyalists to Britain, who had preached "peace without victory," and likewise the Copperheads, or sympathizers with the slave-owning South, who preached the same during the Civil War.

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.

Debs ran for president, in 1920, it would be from behind bars, as Convict No. 9653 in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.

(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.)

They stand as living proof of Marshal Ferdinand Foch's words "The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire."

a mass of ignorant, culturally degraded citizens easily becomes an immense drag on the system. They become easy prey to demagogues and applaud every attempt to undermine the foundations of that “natural liberty” which they have enjoyed in the first place.

In 1803, the liberal political economist Francis Jeffrey identified the middle class or "middling ranks" as the social stratum in which this progress took place. The reasonable, sober, polite, and industrious manners of the middle classes (in French, la bourgeoisie ), Jeffrey argued, form the cutting edge of civilization's moral, economic, and social improvement, which trickles down to the other ranks of society.

The two came to differ on many, if not most, issues. But the man who would single-handedly defy Hitler in 1940 against all odds bears a striking resemblance to the man who organized the first satyagraha campaign in South Africa.