Quotes About History

So what can we, in our time, learn from the past, even while we're getting knocked in the head? That the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. That compromise is the oxygen of democracy. And that we learn the most from those who came before not by gazing up at them uncritically or down on them condescendingly but by looking them in the eye and taking their true measure as human beings, not as gods.

All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.

One wishes for a better outcome, for wiser heads, for a more compassionate public. Yet one wishes in vain. The only comfort, if we can call it that, is that a knowledge of our past failings may equip us to confront evil without delay when evil comes again. For it will.

At times in its history, Christianity has been an instrument of repression. In our living memory, however, it has also been deployed as a means of liberation and progress.

But as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once said, "Righteousness is easy, also cheap, in retrospect." When we condemn posterity for slavery, or for Native American removal, or for denying women their full role in the life of the nation, we ought to pause and think: What injustices are we perpetuating even now that will one day face the harshest of verdicts by those who come after us?

The presidency which under Lincoln had been a tool of transformation had become, under Johnson, a refuge from modernity.

Jefferson had his own privy just steps away from his bed alcove, one of three in the house proper.12 He used pieces of scrap paper for hygiene purposes.13 (Examples were collected from his privy by a family member on the day of Jefferson's death and now survive in the Library of Congress.)14 He

Douglass understood history and the men who made it. Perfection was impossible; greatness was reserved for those who managed to move forward in an imperfect world:

enlarged upon this thesis in another book, The Lost Cause Regained, published in 1868. Pollard

Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass: Their voices, articulating the feelings of innumerable others, ultimately prevailed in the causes of emancipation and of suffrage.

Our nation found its soul of honor on these fields of Gettysburg one hundred years ago. We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.

The founding religion—at least in the Declaration—was based more on a religion of reason than of revelation. But it was still religion.

The task of history was to secure advances in a universe that tends to disappoint. Goodness would not always be rewarded. The innocent would suffer. Violence would at times defeat virtue. Such was the way of things, but to Lincoln the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and to pursue the right.

Historians of the twenty-first century," Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, "will no doubt struggle to explain how nine-tenths of the American people, priding themselves every day on their kindliness, their generosity, their historic consecration to the rights of man, could so long have connived in the systematic dehumanization of the remaining tenth—and could have done so without not just a second but hardly a first thought.

The saga of race in America is a tragic one—and it unfolds still. In Lincoln's hour upon the stage, many hoped he would go farther along the road toward equality than he did; many feared any step at all. But on he walked.

Cassius Marcellus Clay of Lexington, Kentucky, founder of the antislavery newspaper The True American, commanded a crowd of about fifteen hundred in a grove in Springfield. Lincoln, accompanied by his friend Orville Browning, was there. "Whittling sticks, as he lay on the turf, Lincoln gave me a most patient hearing," Clay recalled. "I shall never forget his long, ungainly form, and his ever sad and homely face.

It would not take much to have the throats of every Abolitionist cut. —Preston Brooks of South Carolina, 1856 Judge Taney can do many things, but he cannot perform impossibilities….He cannot change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good evil. —Frederick Douglass, on the Dred Scott decision, 1857 I clearly see, as I think, a powerful plot to make slavery universal and perpetual in this nation. —Abraham Lincoln, 1858

God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.

Black people, Taney went on, "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

General Grant, John Hay recalled, was "deeply impressed with…the late Presidential election. The point which impressed him most powerfully was that which I regarded as the critical one—the pivotal centre of our history—the quiet and orderly character of the whole affair. No bloodshed or riot….It proves our worthiness of free institutions, and our capability of preserving them without running into anarchy or despotism.

the most general sense," the historian Allen C. Guelzo observed, "the paradox of Lincoln's fatalism falls into a pattern that has reapppeared throughout modern Western history, and it arises from the peculiar tendency of determinists, from Oliver Cromwell to Karl Marx, to preach divine or material inevitability at one moment and then turn into the most avowed revolutionary activists at the next.

For thirty-six of the forty years between 1800 and 1840, either Jefferson or a self-described adherent of his served as president of the United States: James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren.32 (John Quincy Adams, a one-term president, was the single exception.)

George Washington and Patrick Henry had resorted to arms to win their liberty—so, Malcolm X argued, why shouldn't African Americans be able to draw on that example in the face of fear, intimidation, and brutality?

he wanted to win. Republicans in the Texas of 1963–64 were Goldwater men, not Rockefeller men. So George Bush was a Goldwater man.