Quotes from Douglas Brinkley

Rosa Parks' entire career has been one as working as a civil rights activist.

There were three Selma-to-Montgomery marches in March 1965, and Rosa Parks had missed the first one. Parks, whose act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, moved to Detroit two years later for safety reasons.

I'm not a partisan.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge - which in 2013 was declared a National Historic Landmark - isn't symbolic of the Civil War in a meaningful way. It is, however, the modern-day battlefield where the voting rights movement was born.

Knievel seemed braver and more brazen - and more unhinged - than any other athlete-cum-thrill-seeker of his era.

Now I'm the father of three children; I'm not able to go live on a bus and do semesters around the country like I did when I was young.

February was always the cruelest month for Hunter S. Thompson. An avid NFL fan, Hunter traditionally embraced the Super Bowl in January as the high-water mark of his year.

We have taken forward steps in learning that wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people alive to-day," Roosevelt said, "but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.

doughty scrawl of his signature, a conservationist weapon, set aside for posterity (or for "the people unborn"* as he put it) over 234 million acres, almost the size of the Atlantic coast states from Maine to Florida (or equal to one out of every ten acres in the United States, including Alaska.) 54 All told, Roosevelt's acreage

Former state senator Joe Neal of Nevada, a political commentator, concluded that the heroism of De'Mont-e Love proved "that a six-year-old demonstrated more leadership than the President of the United States." 14

Hitler's commitment to the V-2 advanced the pursuit of a moonshot by perhaps decades. Though Hitler had no expressed interest in reaching the moon, the uncomfortable fact is that the darkest shafts and foulest backwater of human savagery helped bring this loftiest of human dreams to reality.

originated with a telephone call. On

president," as LBJ had done during Hurricane Betsy. He chose a more

The popular director of OWI was Elmer Davis, an ex-CBS radioman with an admiration for the wire services and Murrow. Working closely with the Librarian of Congress, the poet Archibald MacLeish, who headed the Office of Facts and Figures, Davis believed that truth was the smartest type of propaganda. This was in stark contrast to the Axis nations, which banned opposition newspapers, censored stories, and screened every dispatch. Fortunately

never get into a pissing match with folks who buy ink by the barrel

Smith, quoting British philosopher Edmund Burke, ended Who Speaks for Birmingham? by saying: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Because of his aristocratic upbringing and friendly countenance, no one yet realized he was a master at reading people.

President Johnson no longer trusted Cronkite and his CBS ilk. At a March 1967 dinner party, he told reporters that CBS and NBC were "controlled by the Vietcong.

Influenced by Pete Seeger and the Weavers, McLean proudly wore the mantle of troubadour in the early 1970s, when 'American Pie' topped the Billboard charts, and has never shed the cape.

There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.

Walter Cronkite had a golden rule for all wartime reporters: never self-aggrandize.

One of the things I learned in editing 'The Reagan Diaries' is to never say what Reagan would do, because he surprised people.

Nixon was always willing to be bipartisan, so there are a lot of surprises in the man.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.