Arthur Herman Quotes

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.

his version of American exceptionalism was one that put other nations at a severe disadvantage, as benighted and ignorant of the true course of history, which Wilson (and Wilson alone of world leaders) understood.

We have trodden underfoot the principles of Democracy for the sake of the loftier principles of Social Revolution," Trotsky said. "We are against oppression, but we will not yield our power without a ruthless struggle.

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.

The Aryans also composed two of the world's greatest (and longest) epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which is eight times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey put together and three times longer than the Bible — all without the benefit of writing. These Vedic recitations, both sacred and secular, form the bedrock of Indian and Hindu culture. The

while their generals' strategies committed them to taking the offensive, the new tools of modern warfare gave the overwhelming advantage to the defender.

concentration of wealth in capitalist countries must inevitably lead to war. That intense concentration — Britain, France, Germany, and the United States together, Lenin noted, controlled nearly 80 percent of the world's financial capital — had reduced the possibility for fresh profits in capitalist countries themselves, including the United States.

I don't think he is a bad man," Clemenceau would sometimes say of Wilson, "but I have not yet made up my mind as to how much of him is good."35

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.

peace without victory." He said that "victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished." Such a peace would only breed shame and resentment

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

William Jennings Bryan, told the president that "the basis of peace you propose is a new philosophy . . . that is, new to governments but as old as the Christian religion." It would put Wilson, Bryan averred, "among the Immortals."

Today Americans call their descendants "Scotch-Irish," but we must consider them Scots in every significant respect. In truth, they are the first representatives of the great Scottish diaspora that changed the rest of the world.

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.

(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.)