Quotes from Arthur Herman

To fall for the notion of a 'double truth' and argue there was one set of truths for reason and another for faith and never the two shall meet made nonsense of the idea of truth itself.

Of course Your Excellency will deny this story," Hale blurted out. Zimmermann turned to him. "I cannot deny it," he replied glumly; "it is true."23

the opponents of the Bolshevik Revolution were poised to command 56 percent of the votes in the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks had exactly 175 of 715 seats—hardly a position from which to dominate the proceedings.27

If power truly comes from the barrel of a gun, to borrow a phrase from a later master of the dual state, Mao Zedong, Lenin still had his finger on the trigger, especially in the capital. His best bet, however, was to defuse the authority of the Constituent Assembly before it even met.

Plotinus was also the most relentlessly antimaterialist thinker in history. He taught his disciples that everything we see or imagine to be real is actually only a series of faded images of a higher realm of pure ideas and pure spirit, intelligible only to the soul. According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, he was even sorry that his soul had to live inside a physical body.

Wilson imagined a conversation among European leaders as they realized they had been wrong, and Wilson right, about the war. "Do you not think it likely that the world will some time turn to America and say, 'You were right, and we were wrong. You kept your heads when we lost ours . . . Now, in your self-possession, in your coolness, in your strength, may we not turn to you for counsel and for assistance?' "23

Lenin did not care either way. Their time would come later; for now, his message had been broadcast loud and clear. No one, absolutely no one, would be allowed to stand in the way

The vote for the Constituent Assembly showed that if a determined leader such as Kerensky or Kornilov decided to rally patriotic feeling across the country, that feeling could turn against the German invader as well as Lenin's Bolshevik accomplices

the United States, led by Wall Street, was becoming entangled financially in the fate of the Entente. Defeat of France, Britain, and Russia could mean their default on their debts; default by the Entente would almost certainly mean bankruptcy for America's leading investment firms, not to mention the corporations that depended on the growing transatlantic business between the United States, the Allies, and their chief entrepôt, the port of London.

for the Germans, this moment was exactly what they had been hoping for. Their master plan to send Lenin to Petrograd to take Russia out of the war was paying off even better than they had imagined.

they set to work turning Russia upside down, they had decided it was time to blow up Russia's international relations, in preparation for the world revolution both Lenin and Trotsky were counting on.

In a single day, the Allies' entire financial support network hovered on the brink of collapse. It had all been Wilson's doing, the response to a note he had sent to the Federal Reserve shortly before the election. The president was determined not to let America's financial entanglement with the Allies' cause draw it further into support of their war effort.

never in history, past or present, had an autocratic regime handed over power with so little upheaval or bloodshed.

In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: 'Proletarians of all countries, unite!' "31

The time had come for no more czars. Russia was on the verge of violent revolution; only a complete break from the past, Kerensky insisted, would persuade the masses that a new, more just future was dawning, and that the forces of despotism were now yielding to the forces of freedom.

It was not the last time a well-meaning American Progressive would express the view that if only we made our good intentions plain, the opposition of our foes would melt away.

First, those who seemed to be trying to stop further revolution might actually be allies in preserving it. Second, the real threat would come from someone who until now had been entirely removed from events, and who had the smallest political following of anyone in Russia, namely Lenin.

An evident principle runs through the whole program I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another.

peace without victory." He said that "victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished." Such a peace would only breed shame and resentment

national self-determination ("no right anywhere exists to hand peoples from sovereignty as if they were property")

Wilson. He was convinced he was "speaking for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have as yet had no place or opportunity to speak their real hearts out concerning the death and ruin they see to have come already upon the persons and the homes they hold most dear." So, having spoken for mankind, Wilson left the podium.

the German ambassador in Copenhagen had a bright idea. He suggested to the Foreign Ministry that the best way to use the Russian Revolution to take Russia completely out of the war was to encourage its political extremists, especially those in exile, to return and spread chaos in their home country. The man at the head of everyone's list was Lenin.

American technology was now driving military strategy, rather than the other way around.

A. J. P. Taylor who said that the historian's inevitable task is to decide whether something that happened in history was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.