The Wise Men Quotes

“The golden age of childhood can be quite accurately fixed in time and place [he wrote in Morning and Noon, a volume of early reminiscences]. It reached its apex in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth, before the plunge into a motor age and city life swept away the freedom of children and dogs, put them both on leashes and made them the organized prisoners of an adult world. . . . No one was run over. No one was kidnapped. No one had teeth straightened. No one worried about children, except occasionally my mother, when she saw us riding on the back step of the ice wagon and believed, fleetingly, that one of the great blocks of Pamecha Pond ice would fall on us. But none ever did.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made

“In 1938, the Army Air Corps had 1,773 planes and trained 500 pilots. In 1942, it built 47,000 new planes and trained 30,000 pilots. By the following year, planes were being churned out at a rate of 8,000 a month.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made

“Unless”
― Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made

“A democracy,” Kennan wrote in a note to himself, “is severely restricted in its use of armed forces as a weapon of peacetime foreign policy.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made

“At the front in Germany near the end of the war, McCloy discovered that the ninth-century city of Rothenburg was about to be shelled. McCloy’s mother had once visited the town and brought back etchings; he knew it was an ancient center of German culture. “This is one of Europe’s last great walled cities,” he told the American commander. Perhaps, McCloy suggested, it could be induced to surrender peacefully. It was, and after the war the city voted him an honorary burgher.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made

“Nations convinced him of one thing: “Republican isolationism,” he told a journalist, “was disastrous.” The problems faced by the shipping industry, he felt, stemmed partly from the Republicans’ failure to reduce tariffs. In addition, he increasingly worried that stock market speculation was going “haywire,” and he blamed the Republicans for refusing to restrain it.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made