Denis William Brogan

Sir Denis William Brogan (11 August 1900 – 5 January 1974) was a Scottish writer and historian.

Quotes

American social fences have to be continually repaired; in England they are like wild hedges; they grow if left alone.
- The English People (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), pt 4: "England as a Democracy"

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.
- "An Outsider Looking In", in G. P. Gilmour (ed.) Canada's Tomorrow: Papers and Discussion (Toronto: Macmillan, 1954), p. 275. From Brogan's address to the "Canada's Tomorrow Conference", Quebec City, November 1953

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 man's Jefferson Davis.
- "The Impending Crisis of the Deep South", in Harper's Magazine, vol. 230 (April 1965), p. 148

The American Character (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944)

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.
- Pt. 1: "America Is Made", sec. 2

The combination of a profound hatred of war and militarism with an innocent delight in playing soldiers is one of these apparent contradictions of American life that one has to accept.
- Pt. 1: "America Is Made", sec. 5

A country has the kind of army its total ethos, its institutions, resources, habits of peaceful life, make possible to it. The American army is the army of a country which is law-respecting without being law-abiding. It is the army of a country which, having lavish natural wealth provided for it and lavish artificial wealth created by its own efforts, is extravagant and wasteful. It is the army of a country in which melodramatic pessimism is often on the surface but below it is the permanent optimism of a people that has licked a more formidable enemy than Germany or Japan, primitive North America. It is the army of a country whose national motto has been "root, hog, or die." When convinced that death is the alternative, the hog roots.
- Pt. 3: "The American Way in War", sec. 2

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.
- Pt. 3: "The American Way in War", sec. 2

It is, I have been told, one of the most formidable of Chinese imprecations to wish that your enemy lived "in interesting times." We live in very interesting times; times not to be made better by any simple formula. Understanding each other is not enough, but it is an indispensable beginning.
- Conclusion

We all invent ourselves as we go along, and a great man's myths about himself merely tend to stick better than most.
- Attributed to "Sir Denis Brogan" in Alec Lewis (ed.) The Quotable Quotations Book (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1980), p. 243. Actually by Donal Henahan, "Joys and Sorrows", in The New York Times (12 April 1970), p. 4

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Denis William Brogan