8 Quotes by Frederick Lewis Allen

Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people.

Wilson thought in terms of the whole world; Harding was for America first. And, finally, whereas Wilson wanted America to exert itself nobly, Harding wanted to give it a rest.

It is easier to tear down a code than to put a new one in its place.

Romance cannot be put into quantity production-the moment love becomes casual, it becomes commonplace.

We have something special...a culture which we do not think of as something for the elite, but as something which is accessible to practically everybody.

Though there was much sheer rascality in the Wall Street of the nineteen-twenties, much sheer greed roaming at large, and a widespread betrayal of the fiduciary principle, it may be that none of these things did as much damage to the country, in the sum total, as the sheer irresponsibility of men who, possessing vast powers, played the game of profit and loss without regard for the general public interest.

The new code had been born in disillusionment, and beneath all the bravado of its exponents and the talk upon entering a new era, the disillusionment persisted. If the decade was ill-mannered, it was also unhappy. With the old order of things had gone a set of values which had given richness and meaning to life, and substitute values were not easily found.

Nor did the Roman Catholics escape censure in the regions in which they were in a minority. Did not the members of this Church take their orders from a foreign pope, and did not the pope claim temporal power, and did not Catholics insist upon teaching their children in their own way rather than in the American public schools, and was not all this un-American and treasonable?