Quotes from Hugh Brogan

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.

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?

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.

The business of America is business,' said Calvin Coolidge

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.

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.

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.

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

It is not true that people learn nothing from history: they are marvellous at learning the wrong lessons.

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.

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.

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).

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;

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.

We were happy when he first came. We first thought he came from the Light; but he comes like the dusk of the evening now, not like the dawn of the morning. He comes like a day that has passed, and night enters our future with him… Plains Chieftain, c. 1870

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'.

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

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.

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

The new Republican party thought that it did, and in its 1856 platform denounced slavery and polygamy together as 'twin relics of barbarism'. Or

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

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

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

Hating your neighbour is almost as secure a psychological prop as loving him, especially if he differs from you in looks, language or habits.