Denis William Brogan

"We all invent ourselves as we go along, and a great mans myths about himself merely tend to stick better than most."

"If we are to consider what holds the South back from the modern world in so graceless and often base a way, we must allow for the survival of the Confederate legend. This legend is now less an heroic memory than poison in the blood; it recalls less Chancellorsville, or even Nashville, than Oxford, Mississippi, with Ross Barnett as the poor mans Jefferson Davis."

"American social fences have to be continually repaired; in England they are like wild hedges; they grow if left alone."

"The basic Canadian relationship is not either with the United States or with the United Kingdom, but with the world of the hydrogen bomb. The very fact that Canada is now one of the treasure-houses of the world makes the naive isolationism of the inter-war years...impossible. A uranium-producing country cannot be neutral."

"After the Civil War any well-established village in New England or the northern Middle West could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats."

"For Americans, war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axis—an American decision that this war is sport, or that it is business."