Quotes About History

President Obama is one of the great political knife-fighters in modern history. He is a failed president - his economy is bleak, his foreign policy bleaker, his vision for American even bleaker still. But he wins.

Time and time again in history, it's the emotional argument that wins. Probably since 70,000 BC we've been making decisions in a similar way.

We often know only one version of the story... the version portrayed by the person who wins a war and lives to tell the tale, and the one who loses a war is always remembered as the 'Antagonist' making the victor the 'Protagonist.'

Tests with India always produce some great finishes.

Many people have believed that they were Chosen, but none more baldly than the Texans.

Opera became popular in Texas the same way it did in a lot of previously isolated regions of the nation. It started with money. In the case of Texas, it was oil money, and it made a lot of people very rich, very fast.

Texas was mostly short-grass and tall-grass prairie when modern Europeans arrived here. It really was a land of milk and honey. But when they brought all these cattle onto these relatively small bits of land, and the cattle were allowed to graze freely, they essentially destroyed the prairie.

The Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, was put into effect on January 1, 1863, but news of the Proclamation and enforcement did not reach Texas until after the end of the Civil War almost two years later.

I will say, I'm a great, great, great grandson of Stephen F. Austin. He founded Austin, Texas, which is kind of cool.

'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' is just one of those movies that's like a page of history. You can't really go wrong. It's a prequel. It's not like number three. Which is really cool, to be the before as opposed to the after.

Well, I'm a Texas boy, and we have denim in our blood.

The Republic of Texas is no more.

What was the first name of the Houston club? It wasn't the Astros. It was the Colt .45s. A lot of guys now will say Colt 45 is a beer. But it was also a pistol, and it went right with Texas.

I'm originally from Dallas, Texas, where Bonnie and Clyde were from, so when I was a little kid, my grandfather used to drive me past the Barrow Filling Station. At my elementary school, there was a barn outside that they used to say was a Bonnie and Clyde hangout.

You want to know why there's a Texas Rangers? Well, here's the answer. You know how the six-gun came around? Well, here's the answer. You want to know why Mexicans allowed Americans to settle Texas in the first place? It was fear of Comanches.

I love Texas itself. The landscape is remarkable. The combination of cultures here is incredible. And the history here is pretty remarkable, too, going back centuries.

Baylor has stood here before the state of Texas was even formed. It will be here for a long time. It hit a rough time, but this is what Baylor stands for. It stands for excellence and leadership and service and a spiritual mission.

If children are studying the 20th century, I'm in their text books.

I didn't know anything about '12 Years a Slave.' Not the book, not Solomon Northup, which I was quite shocked by, once I'd read it, that it wasn't a seminal text. I think it deserves to be.

Originalism says that when you consult the text, you give it the meaning it had when it was adopted, not some later modern meaning.

Just as a fossil is 'petrified time,' so is an ancient artifact or text.

How arrogant - how very far from humility - would be the self-satisfied, smug assurance that God, a tidy-up-after-us God will come and clean up our mess? Hope for a nanny God, who will with a miracle grant us amnesty from our folly - that's not aligned with either history or the text of the Bible.

If I wasn't serving in Congress, I've always wanted to be a high school teacher. Specifically, I want to teach a course on modern American history and use Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury as a primary text.

The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street.