1917 Quotes

“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

“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

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

“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, 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

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

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

“The U.S. president’s consent to the Versailles Treaty did more to damage his reputation among his fellow liberals than anything else he did that crucial year. It also sowed the seeds for a bitterness among Germans that would ripen into the political movement that led to Adolf Hitler and World War II.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

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

“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

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

“to a generation of westerners reared on white supremacist dogmas and Darwinism, the clause seemed to offer a dangerous precedent. Such a clause might apply to the Japanese, British foreign minister Balfour pointed out, but what about central Africa?48 The proposal went nowhere.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“now, there was a democratic government in Berlin willing to renounce all its conquests east and west, and to relinquish huge stockpiles of arms, making a renewal of war all but impossible.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“The United States (in the person of Wilson) was now in the habit of dictating unilaterally what happened in the world without asking anyone’s consent, and then letting its Allies catch up.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“nations would arise from the wreckage of the Habsburg Empire—ones that would become the cockpit of turmoil and instability over the next two decades.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“Lenin’s urging, had repudiated the entirety of Russia’s foreign debt, from both the war and before the war: almost nine billion dollars,”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“there was no Russian army anymore to fight. “They have voted with their feet by running away,” Lenin said sardonically.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

“the Ukraine. Its rich grain-producing lands would be essential for the Bolsheviks to feed Russia’s hungry masses, and its industries produced 75 percent of Russia’s iron and 60 percent of its steel.”
― Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder

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