Arthur Herman > Quotes

“The point of this book is that being Scottish is more than just a matter of nationality or place of origin or clan or even culture. It is also a state of mind, a way of viewing the world and our place in it.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“a mass of ignorant, culturally degraded citizens easily becomes an immense drag on the system. They become easy prey to demagogues and applaud every attempt to undermine the foundations of that “natural liberty” which they have enjoyed in the first place.”
― Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“The two came to differ on many, if not most, issues. But the man who would single-handedly defy Hitler in 1940 against all odds bears a striking resemblance to the man who organized the first satyagraha campaign in South Africa.”
― Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

“The priceless copy of Magna Carta on display in the British pavilion was supposed to go home when the fair closed on October 1. After high-level discussion, however, officials thought it would be safer to let it stay in the United States.*”
― Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“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, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“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, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“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, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II

“One could say that Aristotle had turned Plato on his head. Instead of the individual being a pale copy of a more real abstract form, the universal is less real (indeed only a copy) of the individual.15 This reversal left Aristotle’s philosophy with a built-in bias in favor of the individual: in science, in metaphysics, in ethics, and later in politics.”
― Arthur Herman, The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

“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, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“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, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

“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, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“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, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“Theodore Roosevelt was less impressed. He wrote that “peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight”—a sideways shot at Wilson’s manhood and his naïveté. Roosevelt also reminded Americans that in 1776 it was the Tories, the loyalists to Britain, who had preached “peace without victory,” and likewise the Copperheads, or sympathizers with the slave-owning South, who preached the same during the Civil War.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“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, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“The only thing that could save the revolution, Lenin wrote in 1913, would be a war between Austria and Russia. “But it’s scarcely likely that Franz Josef and Nikolasha [Lenin’s nickname for the czar he despised] would grant us this pleasure.”41”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“the first meeting of the Assembly was put off until early January, but not before Lenin had its most conservative party, the Kadet Party, outlawed as “enemies of the people.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“now with his peace offer on the table, it would be even more imperative that the United States not choose sides, in order to preserve its moral leadership over the planet.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“Wilson imagined a conversation among European leaders as they realized they had been wrong, and Wilson right, about the war. “Do you not think it likely that the world will some time turn to America and say, ‘You were right, and we were wrong. You kept your heads when we lost ours . . . Now, in your self-possession, in your coolness, in your strength, may we not turn to you for counsel and for assistance?’ ”23”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’ ”31”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“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, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“Petrograd (St. Petersburg’s new name since the outbreak of war, when the government decided that “St. Petersburg” sounded Teutonic)”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“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, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“In 1892 the Hungarian doctor and journalist Max Nordau published his Entartung (Degeneration), which he dedicated to Cesare Lombroso. Despite its size (almost six hundred pages), the book became an international bestseller and soon appeared in a dozen languages. Nordau had expanded the Lombrosian analysis to show that “degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes … lunatics; they are often authors and artists.” Charles Baudelaire and the French “decadent” poets, Oscar Wilde (Bram Stoker’s original model for Count Dracula), Manet and the Impressionists, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Emile Zola, as well as Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche—all the leading lights of fin de siècle culture, in fact—came under Doctor Nordau’s critical microscope. He concluded that they were all victims of diseased “subjective states of mind.” The modern degenerate artist, like his criminal counterpart, lacks a moral sense: “For them there exists no law, no decency, no modesty.” Emotionalism and hysteria, as well as that old disease of Romanticism, ennui , pervade their works and outlook, Nordau proclaimed, because of their enfeebled nervous state. “The degenerate and insane,” he wrote, “are the predestined disciples of Schopenhauer.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“Both men were obsessed with the power of mind over matter, and held the belief that by sheer force of will, one could send physical events in a certain direction simply by insisting that history dictated such a course of action. This belief would become one of the moral diseases that would afflict the twentieth century until its end. Here, in April 1917, was where it would start with Lenin and Wilson. And whereas Lenin had Marx to encourage him in this conviction, Wilson had Hegel and his own belief in an omniscient providential God.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“(Rejection of the racial equality clause was a particularly bitter grievance for members of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and their spokesman, W. E. B. Du Bois.)”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“In 1803, the liberal political economist Francis Jeffrey identified the middle class or “middling ranks” as the social stratum in which this progress took place. The reasonable, sober, polite, and industrious manners of the middle classes (in French, la bourgeoisie ), Jeffrey argued, form the cutting edge of civilization’s moral, economic, and social improvement, which trickles down to the other ranks of society.”
― Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History

“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, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It

“William Jennings Bryan, told the president that “the basis of peace you propose is a new philosophy . . . that is, new to governments but as old as the Christian religion.” It would put Wilson, Bryan averred, “among the Immortals.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“Marx’s well-worn dictum that the capitalist will sell you the rope you use to hang him with.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“peace without victory.” He said that “victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished.” Such a peace would only breed shame and resentment”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder