Villa and Zapata Quotes

“the simultaneous opposition of Orozco and Zapata to Madero as the conflict of urban, middle-class, educated, national, progressive sectors, based on universal suffrage and rational legal authority, ranged against rural, plebeian, illiterate, parochial, nostalgic, backward-looking groups based on traditional and charismatic authority.”
― Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution

“Alarcón had been a consummate fixer, a master of apparent compromise, verbal obfuscation and political camouflage, whose skills had defused an explosive situation for a decade.”
― Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution

“The village plaza would echo to the peculiar yip-yipping, high-pitched scream or carcajada of inebriated Indians.”
― Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution

“When Cortés and the Conquistadors arrived, Mexico had an estimated population of eleven million but eighty years later this was down to one million, and population levels revived only in the eighteenth century.”
― Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution

“Gradgrindian”
― Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution

“the propagandists and manipulators would first have to be given their heads”
― Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

“It is interesting that almost all Villa's intellectuals were ex-maderistas, more concerned with education and political reforms than with land and labour, basically men who wished to return to the liberalism of Juarez. Angeles probably saw Villa as a tabula rasa on which he could imprint his ideology. The problem was that Villa had no taste for abstract thought; as Reed remarked ironically: `You had to be a philosopher to explain anything to Villa.”
― Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

“CONCLUSION The Mexican Revolution was a ten-year Iliad, in which Villa, Zapata, Obregón, Carranza and the others played the roles in fact which were played in myth by Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector and Aeneas. The loss of life was frightful as the ever-widening spirals of bloodshed sucked in more and more people. Historians estimate the death toll at anything between a low of 350,000 and a high of 1,000,000, but this excludes the victims of the 1918 flu epidemic, which adds another 300,000 to the list of fatalities. Civilisation’s thin veneer was never thinner than in the Mexican Revolution, and the moral is surely that even in advanced societies we skate all the time on the thinnest of ice. A seemingly trivial political crisis can open up the ravening maw of an underworld of chaos.”
― Frank McLynn, Villa and Zapata: A Biography of the Mexican Revolution