The Penguin History of the USA Quotes

“The day was not far off when, as the saying goes, if Wall Street sneezed, the rest of the world would catch a cold. And Wall Street had not discovered how to stop itself sneezing.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“in statesmanship, too great a preoccupation to avoid the errors of the past makes it likely that you will fall into the errors of the present.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“Lincoln spoke for them when, in his first inaugural, he affirmed that labour is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labour and could never have existed if labour had not first existed. Labour is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“To define it is to condemn it. It violates the Golden Rule. As Abraham Lincoln is said to have replied to a pro-slavery argument, ‘What is this good thing that no man wants for himself?”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“It is not always the going from bad to worse that causes a revolution. It happens more often that a people who have borne without complaint, and apparently without feeling, most oppressive laws, throw them off violently as soon as their weight lightens. The system that a revolution destroys is almost always better than that which immediately preceded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually that in which it begins to reform.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“George Wallace, who had been Governor of Alabama during the worst of the troubles there. Wallace had a knack of appealing to racists by inflammatory words and deeds,”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“A common canard of the time showed Ike viewing the Presidency simply as an agreeable place in which to pass the early years of his retirement, with wonderful opportunities for golf.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“It is not true that people learn nothing from history: they are marvellous at learning the wrong lessons.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“Hating your neighbour is almost as secure a psychological prop as loving him, especially if he differs from you in looks, language or habits.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“his genius (for that it undoubtedly was) lay in a certain hot, instinctive cunning which told him how to win power, headlines and a passionately loyal following by manipulating the worst impulses and most entire weaknesses of his fellow-countrymen. He was a liar on a truly amazing scale, telling so many lies, so often, and in such a tangled fashion that Hercules himself could not have completed their refutation, for new falsehoods sprouted faster than old ones could be rebutted. In early life he lost all respect for the pieties and hypocrisies that governed most American politicians and voters, and was therefore able to see quite clearly that the penalties for defying these shibboleths were small, the possible rewards enormous. He lied his way into his first public office,”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“a confirmation of two of history’s more dismal lessons: that grand alliances rarely survive the shock of victory, and that great powers usually behave as rivals rather than as partners.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“The isolationists kept up a loud chorus of denunciation and formed the America First Committee to make sure that the ‘mistake’ of 1917 was not repeated. America First had an amazing range of supporters, from proto-Nazis to socialists – even to the Communist party, which vigorously opposed all American involvement in the ‘imperialist’ war from the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (August 1939) to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941).”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“Cordell Hull and other good Wilsonians who had pinned their faith on international law were outraged and frightened chiefly by Hitler’s lies, by his contempt for treaties and all the machinery of conciliation.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“In an election speech in 1936, he said: I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of line – the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“The business of America is business,’ said Calvin Coolidge”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“Certainly, the new day was at hand when President Harding took office. The amazing disparity between the job and the man has the right twenties flavour: it was an era of contradictions. Harding was not intelligent or firm or hard-working enough to be a successful President. His other personal weaknesses hardly mattered. True, he committed adultery in a coat-cupboard at the White House because he was too afraid of his wife to take his mistress to more comfortable quarters;”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice. Theodore Roosevelt”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“The Congressmen and Senators themselves had seen to it that bribery was the only way of doing business with them. Frequently they would introduce bills so bothersome to business that they would be offered handsome sums to withdraw them. The money would be accepted, since obtaining it was the only point of the enterprise, and the bill would be dropped. This technique was known as ‘the Strike’. Others would call it extortion.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“A library of books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) warned the Americans that they could not safely continue to admit members of inferior races to their country, and asserted that all races were inferior to the glorious Nordic race, whether they were Alpine, Mediterranean, Jewish, black or Oriental.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“In the South it was feared that immigrants did not have the correct racial attitudes: five Italians were lynched, in Tallulah, Louisiana, for associating on equal terms with blacks;”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“The importance of capital in the early Industrial Revolution was so great and so obvious everywhere that it gave rise to several new social and economic theories, of which the most famous is Marxism. It also gave rise to the term ‘capitalism’, and this was by no means so acceptable a development. As”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“by 1890 there were 166,703 miles of railroad (and more to come) and a single railroad corporation might have as many as 36,000 employees. This”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“The Republicans, however, refused to let power slip from their hands so easily. The carpetbag governments in Louisiana and South Carolina announced that Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–93), the Republican candidate, had carried those states and was therefore elected President by a margin of one electoral vote. It was the most outrageous piece of election-rigging in American history (which is saying something) and for a moment it looked as if it might precipitate a renewal of civil war. The”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“No, the art of government was to curb and guide men’s greedy appetites into useful courses, so that, as the Scottish economist Adam Smith proposed, private vice could be public gain. Hamilton”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“The new Republican party thought that it did, and in its 1856 platform denounced slavery and polygamy together as ‘twin relics of barbarism’. Or”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“Reverend John Allen of Massachusetts took up the cry: Blush ye pretended votaries for freedom! ye trifling patriots!… for while you are fasting, praying, nonimporting, nonexporting, remonstrating, resolving, and pleading for a restoration of your charter rights, you at the same time are continuing this lawless, cruel, inhuman, and abominable practice of enslaving your fellow creatures.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“The Boston Latin School, Harvard College and mighty Yale College (founded at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1701, by strict Congregationalists, when Harvard showed alarming signs of liberalism) were merely the most conspicuous of many excellent educational institutions which gave New England the highest literacy rate in the colonies and quite probably in the world. Inoculation”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“The crimes of the Anglo-Americans pale beside those of Cortès and his successors. Hundreds of thousands of Indians were killed outright; even more were worked slowly and horribly to death as slaves. The fact that European diseases were even more destructive hardly excuses the conquistadores. One Carib Indian, about to be burned to death after a rebellion, refused baptism, though it could take him to heaven, because he feared he would find more Christians there. Genocide”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“When, as repeatedly happened, peace was admitted to be war, the Europeans, it has been well said, showed themselves ‘ready to fight to the last Indian’.”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA

“Friends, it has been our misfortune to welcome the white man. We have been deceived. He brought with him some shining things that pleased our eyes; he brought weapons more effective than our own. Above all he brought the spirit-water that makes one forget old age, weakness and sorrow. But I wish to say to you that if you wish to possess these things for yourselves, you must begin anew and put away the wisdom of your fathers. You must lay up food and forget the hungry. When your house is built, your store-room filled, then look around for a neighbour whom you can take advantage of and seize all he has. Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux”
― Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA