Great Throughts Treasury

"It is a woeful mistake to suppose that the educated are kinder or more tolerant: education creates vested interests, and renders the beneficiaries acutely jealous and very vocal."

"Historical research to this day remains unorganized, and the historian is expected to make his own instruments or do without them; and so with wooden ploughs we continue to draw lonely furrows, most successfully when we strike sand."

"1848 remains a seed-plot of history. It crystallized ideas and projected the pattern of things to come; it determined the course of the following century."

"Eastern European Judaism was a frozen mass until the rays of Western Enlightenment began to beat on it. Then some of it remained frozen, some evaporated – that meant assimilation and drifting, and some melted into powerful streams: one was Socialism and the other Zionism."

"A great deal of what is peculiar in English history is due to the obvious fact that Great Britain is an Island. Encroachments on frontier provinces were never possible in the case of England (the Scottish and Welsh Borders may be here left out of account); a conquest had to be complete or could not endure. Frontier encroachments are apt to produce chaos, whereas complete conquests tend to establish strong governments. In anarchical conditions those who bear arms obtain an ascendancy over the other classes, and usually form themselves into a close, dominant caste; while a strong central government, such as was established in England after 1066, was in itself a check on class privileges. Where armies serve as 'expeditionary forces' militarism has little chance to permeate the life of the nation; and there is more of the knight-errant in a merchant-adventurer than in an officer of the militia."

"The Enormous Void - The October days of 1918 in Austria will forever remain remarkable for their mass psychology and as an example of how ideas, talked about yet unthinkable on one day, acquire life on the next, while other ideas, which had seemed solid fact, pass out of reality. Austria-Hungary disappeared when it vanished from the consciousness of those concerned. The War had broken the habits and the approach of defeat disbodied the ideas which made up its political and social structure. The language changed; for the first time men drew conclusions from old familiar facts; the pace at which they did so, quickened daily; it became catastrophical. Diplomatic notes, speeches in the Vienna and Budapest Parliaments, declarations and manifestoes published at Prague, Zagreb, Cracow, or Lvov, were no longer mere moves in a political game. The masses listened to the march of events, the leaders watched the movements of the inarticulate masses. Elemental forces seemed to work through men and to control them, uncontrolled by them. The solid political foundations of inherited everyday existence vanished, and in the enormous void ideas seemed to move, free from hindrance, obeying their own laws."