Quotes from Walter A. McDougall

Washington, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson had imagined the American experiment coming to all sorts of bad ends. They never imagined the Federal City overrun by frontiersmen who cared nothing for history and loved only cheap land and credit, whiskey, tobacco, guns, fast women, fast horses, and Jesus. Not necessarily in that order.

The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years.

America's civilization perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing.

The name for that kind of system in Europe was corporatism, fascism, or national socialism. But the World of Tomorrow Roosevelt would design, Walt Disney would promote, and Superman would personify was to be a friendly fascism securing truth, justice, and the American way, freedom in abundance and abundance in freedom, ultimately for the whole human race.

Like the boy who cried wolf, or the football coach whose pep talks wear thin, the pope or president who turns every cause into a holy one, every enemy into a Hitler, every conflict into a genocide, may soon find his audience rolling its eyes and sinking into the very cynicism he hopes to surmount.