Quotes About History

The Know Nothings fought to delay citizenship for the new immigrants and bar them from voting.

Attempting to circumvent this declaration, Hunter recalled that Charles I of England had entered repeatedly into arrangements with his adversaries despite ongoing hostilities. "I do not profess to be posted in history," Lincoln answered. "On all such matters I will turn you over to Seward. All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I, is, that he lost his head in the end.

A prominent Chicago politician, Justin Butterfield, asked if he was against the Mexican War, replied: "no, I opposed one War [the War of 1812]. That was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine.

The mossy marbles rest On lips that he has prest In their bloom, And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb. Yet, beyond sharing

Abraham Lincoln would maintain that he had never been in favor "of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.

became postmaster general, and Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln's "Mars," eventually became secretary

It soon became clear, however, that Abraham Lincoln would emerge the undisputed captain of this most unusual cabinet, truly a team of rivals. The powerful competitors who had originally disdained Lincoln became colleagues who helped him steer the country through its darkest days. Seward

Shortly before she left for New York, she received an unwelcome present from South Carolina—a painting depicting Lincoln "with a rope around his neck, his feet chained and his body adorned with tar and feathers.

Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry.

Until we address unequal history, we cannot overcome unequal opportunity." Until blacks "stand on level and equal ground," we cannot rest. It must be our goal "to assure that all Americans play by the same rules and all Americans play against the same odds.

Chance had placed him in the catapult and now it was up to the vagaries of history to cut the catapult's rope.

There was little to lead one to suppose that Abraham Lincoln, nervously rambling the streets of Springfield that May morning, who scarcely had a national reputation, certainly nothing to equal any of the other three, who had served but a single term in Congress, twice lost bids for the Senate, and had no administrative experience whatsoever, would become the greatest historical figure of the nineteenth century.

If you interview five people about the same incident, and you see five different points of view, it makes you know what makes history so complicated. Something doesn't just occur. It's not like a scientific event. It's a human event.

At the airfield, the photographers begged for a shot. "You simply cannot do this to me," he laughingly remarked, and they obliged, lowering their cameras. As the president's plane took off, Churchill put his hand on American Vice-Consul Kenneth Pendar's arm. "If anything happened to that man," he said, "I couldn't stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the farthest vision; he is the greatest man I have ever known.

If ever there was a country unprepared for the war, it was the U.S. in 1940. And yet now, only four years later, the United States was clearly the most productive, most powerful country on the face of the earth.

Everything was of interest to him," marveled the French ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, "people of today, people of yesterday, animals, minerals, stones, stars, the past, the future.

If I am ever to be remembered," Johnson wistfully told me, "it will be for civil rights.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

On July 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln convened a special session of his cabinet to reveal—not to debate—his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln rose with great and unaccustomed cheer to greet the final day of his life.

So surely did Lincoln midwife this process of social transformation that we look back at the United States before Abraham Lincoln and after him.

The United States paid $7.5 million for the lands, which were divided into small parcels and sold to natives, creating a new landowning class.

Doris Kearns Goodwin