Top 80 Arthur Herman Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Like many high-minded people, Wilson, when faced with opposition that he considered evil but which refused to yield to his arguments, felt no compunction about simply crossing his arms and refusing to play the game.”

— Arthur Herman

52. “What Wilson aspired to be, to be hailed as the savior of his people and the light of humanity, Lenin had already achieved, but through unbelievable brutality and ruthlessness, and in a broken, starving country.”

— Arthur Herman

53. “In Wilson’s view, America’s neutrality was a reflection of strength, moral strength, rather than weakness or timidity. His other slogan in 1916, besides “He Kept Us Out of War,” was “Too Proud to Fight.”

— Arthur Herman

54. “The vote for the Constituent Assembly showed that if a determined leader such as Kerensky or Kornilov decided to rally patriotic feeling across the country, that feeling could turn against the German invader as well as Lenin’s Bolshevik accomplices.”

— Arthur Herman

55. “Debs ran for president, in 1920, it would be from behind bars, as Convict No. 9653 in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.”

— Arthur Herman

56. “The basic lesson of Indian history was already established. Material power like kingdoms, and kings, including Alexander the Great, comes and goes. But spiritual power, embodied in religion and caste and spiritual unity with Brahman, the changeless essence of the universe, lasts forever. Prime.”

— Arthur Herman

57. “Mussolini would be a powerful example of how the events of 1917 shaped the future – and of the unexpected product of a failed and increasingly bankrupt Wilsonism.”

— Arthur Herman

58. “If America didn’t join the League, it would be “a death warrant” for its children, who would die in the next war.34.”

— Arthur Herman

59. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

60. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

61. “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

62. “By rounding on Kornilov, Russia’s prime minister made an enemy of the one man who could have helped him prevent what was coming.”

— Arthur Herman

63. “Out of the effort to cut back on civilian use of fuel, it was the Federal Fuel Administration that first introduced daylight saving time a year later, in 1918.”

— Arthur Herman

64. “If there is any single lesson to be drawn from this book, it is that utopian dreamers in power tend to breed disaster. But not always, and not forever.”

— Arthur Herman

65. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

66. “Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests,” he continued. “Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy.”

— Arthur Herman

67. “Even after the president’s testimony that the telegram was genuine, newspaper editors and some senators simply refused to believe it.”

— Arthur Herman

68. “Wilson. He was convinced he was “speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have as yet had no place or opportunity to speak their real hearts out concerning the death and ruin they see to have come already upon the persons and the homes they hold most dear.” So, having spoken for mankind, Wilson left the podium.”

— Arthur Herman

69. “One of the votes against war came from the very first woman ever to sit in the House of Representatives, Jeannette Rankin.”

— Arthur Herman

70. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

71. “The result was a double disaster. The Chinese delegates refused to sign the final treaty, and left Paris in high dudgeon. When the news reached China, anti-Western and anti-Japanese riots exploded across the country. On May 4, some five thousand Chinese students stormed into Tiananmen Square in Peking to protest the Treaty of Versailles.”

— Arthur Herman

72. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

73. “In 1914, Paris had been the second-largest center of international finance, after London. As 1916 ended, the only credit it could get to keep itself in the war came from Britain via London’s bounteous cornucopia of loans from Wall Street.”

— Arthur Herman

74. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

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

— Arthur Herman

76. “The German delegation, led by a clutch of Social Democratic politicians, arrived in Paris in early May. They expected to be treated, especially by Wilson, as a fellow democratic nation, there to negotiate a final equitable peace. Instead, to their shock and humiliation, they were received as a beaten adversary to be punished and reduced to impotence, while Wilson sat mutely by, doing nothing.”

— Arthur Herman

77. “The archetypal dwelling of the American frontier, the log cabin, was in fact a Scots development, if not invention. The word itself, cabine, meant any sort of rude enclosure or hut, made of stone and dirt in Scotland, or sod and mud in Ireland.”

— Arthur Herman

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

— Arthur Herman

79. “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.”

— Arthur Herman

80. “But for those at the top of Indian society, British rule brought an administration that was fair, uncorrupt, and comfortably distant. Indian elites in the three presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay were content to submit to the East India Company’s rules, serve in its armies, and help it collect money to pay for them as long as they were left alone to get on with their normal affairs. It was for those at the bottom, especially in eastern India, that the British brought disaster. This.”

— Arthur Herman

81. “Democracy makes a stable civic life impossible. As Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says, “I turned my back on those who rule when I saw what they call ruling: higgling and haggling for power with the rabble.”

— Arthur Herman

82. “Plotinus was also the most relentlessly antimaterialist thinker in history. He taught his disciples that everything we see or imagine to be real is actually only a series of faded images of a higher realm of pure ideas and pure spirit, intelligible only to the soul. According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, he was even sorry that his soul had to live inside a physical body.”

— Arthur Herman

83. “American technology was now driving military strategy, rather than the other way around.”

— Arthur Herman

84. “Being “civilized” had originally meant living under Roman, or “civil,” law; but at the dawn of the Renaissance it had come to denote a way of life and law distinct from that of barbarism. It included prohibitions against murder, incest, and cannibalism; belief in a transcendant creative divinity; respect for property and legal contracts; and essential social institutions such as marriage, friendship, and the family.”

— Arthur Herman