83 Quotes by Arthur Herman

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.

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

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.

Their actions highlight the curious self-righteousness of the American Progressive mind, and the belief among Progressives that their views once arrived at were beyond criticism; as with Wilson, opposition itself became a sign of disloyalty, even of evil.29.

Everyone hates war, the senator stated at the start, and therefore it was time to lay aside the argument that if men differed over how to prevent one, then the other side must necessarily be against peace.

First, those who seemed to be trying to stop further revolution might actually be allies in preserving it. Second, the real threat would come from someone who until now had been entirely removed from events, and who had the smallest political following of anyone in Russia, namely Lenin.

When, two years later, the Paris Peace Conference wrapped itself around the principle of self-determination, it was automatically assumed that the principle posed no threat to the existing colonial empires of the victorious powers – the United States included.

There was Wilson’s overweening spiritual arrogance, which Nicolson saw as part of the president’s Presbyterian inheritance. There was Wilson’s thin-skinned response to the slightest criticism or opposition, but above all, there was, as Wilson himself admitted, the American president’s “one-track mind.

Knowledge is power – all Scottish philosophers recognized this – and the route to knowledge is through experience. But Reid insisted that that power belonged to every man, regardless of any other attributes. Human progress rests on expanding that capacity to its utmost and to as many people as possible, so that we can all become truly, morally free.