Mark

“When the cry for 'a return to gold' goes up, as it sometimes does in the United States, it usually comes from folk who know little about the history of the subject.”
― Ian M. Drummond, The Gold Standard and the International Monetary System, 1900-1939

“In this ultimate sense Taft had fallen out of step with his times. Too much himself to soften his profile, he happened on the national scene at the same time that Franklin D. Roosevelt was demonstrating the magic to be wrung from the mass media. Myopic and somewhat disdainful about “image,” he struggled to prominence just as public opinion polling developed into a powerful tool for his opponents. Instinctively partisan, he tried for the presidency after the depression had helped the Democrats build an electoral coalition that forced Republicans to turn to Dewey and even to such unpartisan figures as Willkie and Eisenhower. Fearful of commitments abroad, he reflected broad currents of thought about foreign policy more suited to the 1920s – or even the late 1960s – than to the frightening years spanned by Hitler and Stalin. Like the two men who had affected him most, his father and Herbert Hoover, Taft had clung steadfastly to a set of assumptions about the world. Like them again, he had been swept aside while new men of destiny – Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower – came in to fill the void. When the delegates whispered “Taft Can’t Win,” they were talking not only about a man who lacked charisma but a figure who seemed uncomfortable with the world of 1952.”
― James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography Of Robert A. Taft

“Our national problem has not been ignoring the Civil War, but turning it into a kind of theme park in which nostalgia and mendacity have eclipsed the raw and unpleasant truth that one army fought, and lost, a battle for the liberty to enslave other human beings, while the other, full of imperfect men fighting for a variety of motives, secured the emancipation of those human beings and thereby preserved a political experiment underwritten by the idea of equality.”
― Elizabeth D. Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

“Having risked the loss of Canada in order to conquer Silesia for the King of Prussia, France was to lose it finally in the next war for the pleasure of attempting to restore that province to the Queen of Hungary. France, having played the game of Prussia in the War of the Austrian Succession, was to play that of Austria in the Seven Years War.”
― Albert Sorel, Europe and the French Revolution: The Political Traditions of the Old Régime