Arthur Herman Quotes

This intellectual disability "rendered him blindly impervious, not merely to human character but also to shades of difference. He possessed no gift for differentiation, no capacity for adjustment to circumstances. It was his spiritual and mental rigidity that proved his undoing."38

nations would arise from the wreckage of the Habsburg Empire — ones that would become the cockpit of turmoil and instability over the next two decades.

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."

The archetypal dwelling of the American frontier, the log cabin, was in fact a Scots development, if not invention. The word itself, cabine, meant any sort of rude enclosure or hut, made of stone and dirt in Scotland, or sod and mud in Ireland.

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.

Lenin's urging, had repudiated the entirety of Russia's foreign debt, from both the war and before the war: almost nine billion dollars,

The telegram offered the promise that if Mexico allied itself with Germany, then Germany would help Mexico "regain by conquest her lost territory in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico." It went even further, suggesting that Germany and Mexico also reach out to Japan, and encourage that country's defection from the Allied camp by "mediating a peace," while offering to let the Japanese join in the spoils taken from the breakup of America's presence along the Pacific.

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.

It was Wilson and Wilson alone who was the source of the problems that haunted the Peace Conference and, afterward, the Treaty of Versailles.

It was Lenin, not Stalin, who turned his utopian dream of a new Communist global order into a living nightmare.

now, there was a democratic government in Berlin willing to renounce all its conquests east and west, and to relinquish huge stockpiles of arms, making a renewal of war all but impossible.

Bill Knudsen summed up simply and succinctly. "Progress is only made when fear is overcome by curiosity," he said. "If you are curious enough, you will not have any fear."

there was no Russian army anymore to fight. "They have voted with their feet by running away," Lenin said sardonically.

The result was a double disaster. The Chinese delegates refused to sign the final treaty, and left Paris in high dudgeon. When the news reached China, anti-Western and anti-Japanese riots exploded across the country. On May 4, some five thousand Chinese students stormed into Tiananmen Square in Peking to protest the Treaty of Versailles.

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.