83 Quotes by Arthur Herman

Please do not misunderstand me,” he once told Wilson. “We too came into the world with the noble instincts and the lofty aspirations which you express so often and so eloquently. We have become what we are because we have been shaped by the rough hand of the world in which we have to live and we have survived only because we are a tough bunch.

Did Wilson suffer a stroke on that day in late April? The evidence strongly suggests he did. It may not have been severe enough to render him unable to attend meetings or to cause him to withdraw from public settings, but that he was physically and mentally a different man after the date seems indisputable. If it was a stroke, it would leave him impaired just when he most needed his strength.

Americans couldn’t go to war: with 1.3 million German immigrants living in the United States, Zimmermann was fond of pointing out, plus another 10 million Americans of German descent, any military move against Germany would trigger a national uprising.

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.

Villagers still worship at shrines dedicated to gods and goddesses with roots in the Stone Age.12 Compared to this unequaled staying power, the British Raj seemed very transitory – like every other ruler or conqueror in Indian history. Gandhi made his own view plain in 1909, in his Hind Swaraj. “History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of love or of the soul,” he wrote, “a record of the interruption of the course of nature.

Acceding to Roosevelt’s request would have cemented Wilson’s standing with pro-war Republicans; turning him down alienated them permanently.

With a commander in chief handing out a general license to hunt for spies, it’s not surprising Americans responded.

Lodge added that he was not ruling out the United States’ joining an organization such as a League of Nations, but as far as the current version went, “we are asked to abandon the policies which we have adhered to during all our life as a Nation” – and that, he believed, the Senate should not do.9.

In fact, it was Lenin and Trotsky who set up the totalitarian apparatus Stalin would use to impose his one-man rule – and they knew exactly what it would be used to do.