Top 80 Arthur Herman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I learned when you shout at someone,” he once said, “you make him afraid. And when he’s afraid, he won’t tell you his troubles” – or tell a manager the truth about what on the assembly line wasn’t working, or what had gone wrong. An.”

— Arthur Herman

2. “An evident principle runs through the whole program I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another.”

— Arthur Herman

3. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

4. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

5. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

6. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

7. “Of course Your Excellency will deny this story,” Hale blurted out. Zimmermann turned to him. “I cannot deny it,” he replied glumly; “it is true.”23.”

— Arthur Herman

8. “When the ruler or rulers failed to act in the people’s interest, Buchanan wrote, then each and every citizen, even “the lowest and meanest of men,” had the sacred right and duty to resist that tyrant, even to the point of killing him.”

— Arthur Herman

9. “The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves.”

— Arthur Herman

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

— Arthur Herman

11. “As for Japan, the rejection of the racial equality clause and, by implication, of Japan’s status as a Great Power equal to France or Britain doomed those Japanese politicians arguing for an accommodationist, pro-Western slant to their country’s foreign policy, especially toward the United States.”

— Arthur Herman

12. “Soldiers disturbed by the Znamenskaya Square massacre had sat up all night debating what to do if ordered to fire on civilians again. On the morning of March 12, they voted to disobey such an order. One regiment after another joined the vote; soon, soldiers were pouring out into the streets to join the demonstrators. It was the largest military mutiny in history.”

— Arthur Herman

13. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

14. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

15. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

16. “Wilson’s ringing words on receiving the news – “a little band of wilful men representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible” –.”

— Arthur Herman

17. “In my view the end of the war will be unforeseeable because – despite all that can be said to the contrary – the power and resources of the United States are very great.”36.”

— Arthur Herman

18. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

19. “Lenin had published a crucial article in Pravda entitled “Theses on the Constituent Assembly.” It was, as historian Richard Pipes puts it, “a death sentence on the Assembly.”

— Arthur Herman

20. “Joffre himself had done nothing to change his strategy, which was attack, attack, attack, regardless of the losses or, incredibly, without any substantive sign of success. Instead, Joffre had watched impassively as the French casualties mounted.”

— Arthur Herman

21. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

22. “The war had come down to a race, to who would be starved out first, the Germans or the Allies.7.”

— Arthur Herman

23. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

24. “Wilson’s mission now was not saving Russian democracy; it was defeating Germany, the outlaw nation, and pressing the war forward to the conclusion he desired, a great peace conference at which the sources of all the world’s conflicts and wars would finally be resolved.”

— Arthur Herman

25. “In a single day, the Allies’ entire financial support network hovered on the brink of collapse. It had all been Wilson’s doing, the response to a note he had sent to the Federal Reserve shortly before the election. The president was determined not to let America’s financial entanglement with the Allies’ cause draw it further into support of their war effort.”

— Arthur Herman

26. “The war was a disease that all the Great Powers of Europe had carried in their political DNA, as it were. Now it was up to America, and Woodrow Wilson, to point the way to the cure.”

— Arthur Herman

27. “When the chairman of the Democratic National Committee came to see him after the election to ask for some political favors, and reminded Wilson that he owed his election to that party and its leadership committee, Wilson coldly cut him down to size. “Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States,” he told the astonished chairman. “Neither you nor any other mortal could have chosen another president.”30.”

— Arthur Herman

28. “By the winter of 1916, German civilians were starving, even starving to death. Unless the war ended very soon, Germany faced catastrophe even if not a single Allied soldier advanced another step.”

— Arthur Herman

29. “Thanks to Erasmus, the new trend of the 1500s was away from universities and toward an entirely revolutionary idea: homeschooling.”

— Arthur Herman

30. “A. J. P. Taylor who said that the historian’s inevitable task is to decide whether something that happened in history was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.”

— Arthur Herman

31. “In these lean years, the Bolsheviks turned to crime to raise the funds they needed to stay alive as a movement, and the man who emerged as the John Dillinger of the Leninist faction was Stalin. “Sometimes a scoundrel is useful to our party,” Lenin wrote, “precisely because he is a scoundrel.”

— Arthur Herman

32. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

33. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

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

— Arthur Herman

35. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

36. “The term used to describe them was rednecks, a Scots border term meaning Presbyterians. Another was cracker, from the Scots word craik for “talk,” meaning a loud talker or braggart. Both words became permanent parts of the American language, and a permanent part of the identity of the Deep South the Ulster Scots created.”

— Arthur Herman

37. “To Wilson, however, it would be worth the sacrifice. By entering the war, America was also transforming the conflict from a competition for empire and national interests into a crusade to make the world safe for democracy and to secure mankind’s hopes for future peace.”

— Arthur Herman

38. “Fifty-five thousand casualties for five hundred yards’ gain on the Champagne front in February 1915; 60,000 lost again that spring at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel; 120,000 in May at Arras. The next year brought the slaughter at Verdun stretching from February to June, with 315,000 total French casualties. Then came the French support for the British offensive along the Somme from July to November, in which another 200,000 were killed or wounded – all for little significant gain.”

— Arthur Herman

39. “Howard Coffin, president of the Society of Automotive Engineers, declared, “Twentieth-century war demands that the blood of the soldier must be mingled with three to five parts of the sweat of the men in the factories, mills, mines, and fields of the nation in arms” –.”

— Arthur Herman

40. “Wilson worried that the Constitution itself would not survive: “a nation can’t put its strength into a war and keep its head level; it has never been done.”13.”

— Arthur Herman

41. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

42. “Do not imagine, comrades, that I am simply looking for a revolutionary form of justice. We have no concern about justice at this hour! We are at war, on the front where the enemy is advancing, and the fight is to the death.”3.”

— Arthur Herman

43. “Debs would draw a ten-year sentence for making a single antidraft speech.”

— Arthur Herman

44. “They stand as living proof of Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s words “The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.”

— Arthur Herman

45. “The roots of a future war were planted that fateful spring; Wilson’s failure to support Japan’s highest aspirations would end with bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor.”

— Arthur Herman

46. “Lenin did not care either way. Their time would come later; for now, his message had been broadcast loud and clear. No one, absolutely no one, would be allowed to stand in the way.”

— Arthur Herman

47. “Albert Burleson, had already declared war on the Socialist Party by yanking second-class postal rates for a series of socialist-minded periodicals, including The Masses, the Milwaukee Leader, the New York Call, and the paper Trotsky had written for, the Forward.19.”

— Arthur Herman

48. “The time had come for no more czars. Russia was on the verge of violent revolution; only a complete break from the past, Kerensky insisted, would persuade the masses that a new, more just future was dawning, and that the forces of despotism were now yielding to the forces of freedom.”

— Arthur Herman

49. “This country seems able to do more by accident than any other country can do on purpose. – Employee at Bechtel-McCone B-29 modification plant, Birmingham, Alabama, 1943.”

— Arthur Herman

50. “In Wilson’s mind, the signing represented the defeat not simply of Germany but of an entire way of organizing the world. Balance of power, armed alliances, secret treaties, “might makes right” – all these assumptions would now be thrown out.”

— Arthur Herman