Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Schlesinger’s line refuses the clean fantasy that history can be redesigned with speeches, budgets, and good intentions. “New world order” sounds like a boardroom slogan, but he yanks it back into the oldest currency of statecraft: blood. The blunt triad - “words and money” trailing behind “blood” - is a moral audit of American power, a reminder that policy is not just persuasion plus appropriations; it’s coercion, risk, and bodies.

The intent is double-edged. On one hand, he’s puncturing liberal technocracy: the belief that enlightened rhetoric and economic leverage can midwife a stable international system. On the other, he’s also puncturing conservative triumphalism: the idea that a new order can be declared and then painlessly enforced. By bundling “words” with “money,” he implies that even “soft” instruments are forms of payment, but he ranks them beneath the cost that can’t be laundered into abstraction.

The subtext is aimed at citizens as much as at presidents. Schlesinger, a Kennedy-era court historian and later a critic of imperial overreach, understood how democratic publics are sold wars with language that minimizes sacrifice: operations, interventions, commitments. His sentence is a prophylactic against euphemism. If you want to rearrange the world - contain communism, export democracy, police failed states - you’re implicitly consenting to casualties, and you should say so before the first flag-draped coffin makes the argument for you.

Contextually it reads like postwar realism filtered through a liberal conscience: a warning that “order” is never free, and the bill always arrives.