Short American History Quotes

#1. One of the biggest things I understood in a program like that was that it allowed more young African American scholars to do field research in the Caribbean and in Africa than had ever happened before in the history of the country and since. #Quote by Bernice Johnson Reagon

#2. But without a Montezuma, how do you lead? Instead of a chief, the Apaches had a Nant'an-a spiritual and cultural leader. The Nant'an led by example and held no coercive power. Tribe members followed the Nant'an because they wanted to, not because they had to. One of the most famous Nant'ans in history was Geronimo, who defended his people against the American forces for decades. Geronimo never commanded an army. Rather, he himself started fighting, and everyone around him joined in. The idea was, "If Geronimo is taking arms, maybe it's a good idea. Geronimo's been right in the past, so it makes sense to fight alongside him." You wanted to follow Geronimo? You followed Geronimo. You didn't want to follow him? Then you didn't. The power lay with each individual-you were free to do what you wanted. The phrase "you should" doesn't even exist in the Apache language. Coercion is a foreign concept. #Quote by Ori Brafman

#3. As one descendant of a black cowboy explained, "We didn't write the books. We didn't produce the movies. So we were politely deleted." There is a conspicuous absence of the black cowboy recorded in the history of the American cattle-ranching industry. The role these men played in the settling of the Old West deserves scholarly attention.
As #Quote by Tricia Martineau Wagner

#4. I hate American History after 1850. #Quote by Emma Iadanza

#5. The conservative interpretation of American history says that wherever the word 'God' appears, it's obviously our God, it's obviously a Christian God; it's usually an evangelical God. The simplest point I'm making is: That is just absolutely not true. #Quote by Matthew Stewart

#6. What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war? #Quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski

#7. Today's China is an artifact of an extended and contentious history while the relatively young American Republic is a daring project informed by the enlightenment philosophy espoused by the Founding Fathers. #Quote by Patrick Mendis

#8. This Congress did more to uplift education, more to attack disease in this country and around the world, and more to conquer poverty than any other session in all American history, and what more worthy achievements could any person want to have? For it was the Congress that was more true than any other Congress to Thomas Jefferson's belief that: 'The care of human life and happiness is the first and only legitimate objective of good Government.' #Quote by Lyndon B. Johnson

#9. The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats. #Quote by Ayn Rand

#10. Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father. #Quote by Gloria Steinem

#11. Far from being marginalized, as is presently the case, nineteenth-century freethought was a social movement at the core of our national life. #Quote by Fred Whitehead

#12. Below the surface, the force driving noir stories is the urge to escape: from the past, from the law, from the ordinary, from poverty, from constricting relationships, from the limitations of the self. Noir found its fullest expression in America because the American psyche harbors a passion for independence . . . With this desire for autonomy comes a corresponding fear of loneliness and exile. The more we crave success, the more we dread failure; the more we crave freedom, the more we dread confinement. This is the shadow that spawns all of noir's shadows: the anxiety imposed by living in a country that elevates opportunity above security; one that instills the compulsion to "make it big," but offers little sympathy to those who fall short. Film noir is about people who break the rules, pursuing their own interests outside the boundaries of decent society, and about how they are destroyed by society - or by themselves. Noir springs from a fundamental conflict between the values of individual freedom and communal safety: a fundamental doubt that the two can coexist. . . . Noir stories are powered by the need to escape, but they are structured around the impossibility of escape: their fierce, thwarted energy turns inward. The ultimate noir landscape, immeasurable as the ocean and confining as a jail cell, is the mind - the darkest city of all. #Quote by Imogen Sara Smith

#13. There is no 20-year period in American history when stocks lost money. #Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

#14. The history of the two halves of post-war Europe cannot be told in isolation from one another. The legacy of the Second World War - and the pre-war decades and the war before that - forced upon the governments and peoples of east and west Europe alike some hard choices about how best to order their affairs so as to avoid any return to the past. One option - to pursue the radical agenda of the popular front movements of the 1930s - was initially very popular in both parts of Europe (a reminder that 1945 was never quite the fresh start that it sometimes appears). In eastern Europe some sort of radical transformation was unavoidable. There could be no possibility of returning to the discredited past. What, then, would replace it? Communism may have been the wrong solution, but the dilemma to which it was responding was real enough.
In the West the prospect of radical change was smoothed away, not least thanks to American aid (and pressure). The appeal of the popular-front agenda - and of Communism - faded: both were prescriptions for hard times and in the West, at least after 1952, the times were no longer so hard. And so, in the decades that followed, the uncertainties of the immediate post-war years were forgotten. But the possibility that things might take a different turn - indeed, the likelihood that they would take a different turn - had seemed very real in 1945; it was to head off a return of the old demons (unemployment, Fascism, German militarism, war, revolution) #Quote by Tony Judt

#15. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. #Quote by Frederick Jackson Turner

#16. That was when I realized we weren't born to be
slaves. It was ignorant for any man to think he could be the master of another. We were all meant to be free, and somewhere there were good people helping to heal this broken world. #Quote by Jay Grewal

#17. John Kerry's wife Teresa Heinz is on the cover of Newsweek magazine this week and they said that if he is elected president, she will be the oldest first lady in American history. But that doesn't bother John Kerry, he said, 'To me, she looks like a million bucks' #Quote by Jay Leno

#18. He presented himself as the friend to Main Street America, and yet that aw-shucks persona ended up packaging policies and programs that were at times deeply injurious to the very people he swore to serve. After all, Reaganomics set in motion one of the largest wealth redistributions in American history, away from the poor and toward the rich. #Quote by Eugene Jarecki

#19. The Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have taken the biggest lurch to the left in policy in American history. There've been no - no Congress, no administration that has run this far to the left in such a small period of time. And there is a reaction to that. #Quote by Haley Barbour

#20. Happy belated 4th of July to the Americans July 2, 1776, was meant for. Not the American's; some of whom's ancestors fought for the British against a nation that DIDN'T then, COULDN'T after The Emancipation Proclamation, and still CAN'T seem to recognize our basic human rights. #Quote by A.K. Kuykendall

#21. History, in other words, is just a device to be used by well-paid boobherds to drive the American cattle in bovine content to their pastures or to the abattoir. #Quote by Revilo P. Oliver

#22. To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics. #Quote by Mary McCarthy

#23. I just play to progressive audiences. You know, if they're watching Discovery Channel, History Channel, that kind of thing, "Monty Python" have already laid the groundwork. They're known around the world. People like that kind of surrealist, left-field humor, and that's what I do. And "Saturday Night Live," a lot of American humor. "The Simpsons," above all, the weird, left-field humor, which I love. And sardonic. So that's all I'm doing. I find that audience, and they're in every developed country around the world. #Quote by Eddie Izzard

#24. My reading of American religious history is that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power. Once you identify the faith with a particular candidate or party or with the quest for political influence, ultimately it is the faith that suffers. Compromise may work in politics. It's less appropriate to the realm of faith and belief. #Quote by Randall Balmer

#25. The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler...this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar. #Quote by Timothy Snyder

#26. As you probably know, some American politicians and American journalists refer to Washington, DC as the "capital of the free world." But it seems to me that this great city (Brussels), which boasts 1,000 years of history and which serves as the capital of Belgium, the home of the European Union, and the headquarters for NATO, this city has its own legitimate claim to that title. #Quote by Joe Biden

#27. Having pursued this matter of Christian-traditional relationships as far as I have, it might be concluded that the rest of the book is permeated with references to it. That is not the case. All I have wanted to do is to fix in literary cement what amounts to one of the most incredible milestones in Christian church history - a stunning reversal of opinion where Native American religion is concerned. I harbor no illusions that such developments as these will escalate into anything like acceptance by all, or even a majority of, the Christian churches. But it is a strong beginning, and I, together with the Native Americans, am exceedingly grateful for it! Now though, everything that needs to be said about this has been said, and from here on the book is entirely Fools Crow. Among #Quote by Thomas E. Mails

#28. Huzzah! Free Trade and Sailors' Rights! But instead American ships are captured and sailors impressed by the thousands into the British Navy, becoming slaves to the lash, while the United States has virtually no navy to back them up. Baltimore native, Nathan Jeffries, son of an American hero, Captain William Jeffries, and his Quaker wife, Amy, is haunted by the memories of his fiancee, his best friend, his enemy's woman and his betrayal. Chesapeake Bay is no refuge aboard his father's brig Bucephalus;facing his worst fears, he is chased and captured by armed privateer schooner Scourge. In a violent world at war, Nathan must break his most solemn promise to his mother. For Nathan and the young United States, 1812 would severely challenge rights of passage. #Quote by Bert J. Hubinger

#29. As professionals , the odds were in our favor, or so we believed. #Quote by Floyd C. Forsberg

#30. To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting American's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte. #Quote by Ta-Nehisi Coates

#31. He enjoys the surprise on people's faces when he tells them he's a professor of American history. "Well, I am American," he says when people blink, a barb of defensiveness in his tone. Someone #Quote by Celeste Ng

#32. This power, this black power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet. Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello - which is to say, the view taken in struggle. And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors. #Quote by Ta-Nehisi Coates

#33. More than 95 percent of both legal and illegal immigration into the United States is non-white. Because of the way immigration law is structured, the highest-skilled nations on earth - those of Europe - are allowed only a tiny percentage of immigrants, while the third world nations such as Mexico are dumping their chaff onto American shores at the highest rate in history. #Quote by David Duke

#34. The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace. #Quote by Lauren Groff

#35. I like American history, so I was aware of the participants and a lot of it. #Quote by Kevin Costner

#36. For much of American history, the worst classes were seen as extrusions of the worst land: scrubby, barren, and swampy wasteland. Home ownership remains today the measure of social mobility. #Quote by Nancy Isenberg

#37. I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all. #Quote by James Baldwin

#38. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy - in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America's rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. #Quote by Ta-Nehisi Coates

#39. FEW PEOPLE in American history have been as consistently disliked as the Puritans. #Quote by Jim Cullen

#40. The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think ... Let us dare to read, think, speak, write. #Quote by David McCullough

#41. THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT FRENCH CINEMA, specifically the women of today's French cinema - a subject as vital as life and as irresistible as movies. Yet many Americans, unfamiliar with French film, will hear "women of today's French cinema" and immediately imagine something forbidding or austere. Other more refined cineastes may know and appreciate the French movies that play at art houses and arrive on DVD in this country, but they can't know the full story. They are not in a position to know that what they are seeing is just a hint of something vast and extraordinary. The full story is that for the last two decades France has been in the midst of an explosion of female talent. What is happening in France today is a blossoming of female brilliance and originality of a kind that has never happened anywhere or at any period of film history, with but one glorious exception - in the Hollywood of the 1930s. Indeed, today's Hepburns, Davises, Crawfords, Garbos, and Stanwycks are not American.

They're French. They are working constantly, appearing up to three or four times each year in films geared to their star personalities and moral meaning. These films, often intelligent, personal, and insightful investigations into what it means to be human in the twenty-first century, are the kinds of films that many Americans want to see. And they wonder why no one is making them. But people are making them, just not in the United States. Moreover, women are not only working in front #Quote by Mick LaSalle

#42. In a lonely grave, forgotten and unknown, lies "the man who saved a President," and who as a result may well have preserved for ourselves and posterity Constitutional government in the United States - the man who performed in 1868 what one historian has called "the most heroic act in American history, incomparably more difficult than any deed of valor upon the field of battle" - but a United States Senator whose name no one recalls: Edmund G. Ross of Kansas. The #Quote by John F. Kennedy

#43. The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother. #Quote by Betty Friedan

#44. I am convinced that the stratigraphic method will in the future enable archaeology to throw far more light on the history of American culture than it has done in the past. #Quote by Edward Sapir

#45. I am a college-educated American. In all my years of formal schooling, I never read Plato or Aristotle, Homer or Virgil. I knew nothing of Greek and Roman history and barely grasped the meaning of the Middle Ages. Dante was a stranger to me, and so was Shakespeare. The fifteen hundred years of Christianity from the end of the New Testament to the Reformation were a blank page, and I knew only the barest facts about Luther's revolution. I was ignorant of Descartes and Newton. My understanding of Western history began with the Enlightenment. Everything that came before it was lost behind a misty curtain of forgetting. Nobody did this on purpose. Nobody tried to deprive me of my civilizational patrimony. But nobody felt any obligation to present it to me and my generation in an orderly, coherent fashion. Ideas have consequences - and so does their lack. #Quote by Rod Dreher

#46. I understood ... that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history. #Quote by Laura Ingalls Wilder