Quotes About Struggle

Yes, it was rape, but only technical, brother, only technical. Above the waist, maybe she was worried about the sacrilegio, but from the waist down she wanted me, bad. There couldn't be any doubt about that.

We had all that love, and we just cracked up under it. It's a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That's what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords. God is up there laughing at us.

describing the Confederate army as a "dark, rebellious host.

James M. McPherson

James M. McPherson

Grant said that Shiloh convinced him that the rebellion could be crushed only by complete conquest

Thus the war was a struggle between two conflicting capitalist systems—one reactionary, based on slave labor, and fearful of change; the other progressive, competitive, innovative, and democratic.

Of course people live in the short run, and the average worker trying to make ends meet during economic downturns in, say, 1841 or 1857 lacked the molifying perspective of an historian.

The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way. Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of turning back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness.

Although the working poor of New York would explode into the worst riot of American history in 1863

We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible . . . [and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it."5

It began to appear that something larger than a lady's thimble might be needed to hold the blood shed in this war.

American whites somehow were able collectively to love liberty, recognize the evils of slavery, and tolerate slavery, all at the same

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Son, a blessing favors them that needs it. Don't matter how it comes. It just matters that it does.

I was ashamed of my mother, but see, love didn't come natural to me until I became a Christian.- Ruth McBride

Most times I don't know what I'm doing. Sometimes I feel like I don't hardly know enough to tie my own shoes.

Everybody went to jail in the Cause eventually. You could be the tiniest ant able to slip into a crack in the sidewalk, or a rocket ship that flew fast enough to break the speed of sound, it didn't matter. When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is.

When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is. Soup

He ain't gonna live long, child. He's crazy. He thinks the n***ers's equal to the white man.

the sadness, the suspicion, the weariness, the knowledge that came from living a special misery in a world of misery.

the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man's dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country.

The enemy was irony and truth and hypocrisy, that was the real enemy. That was the enemy that was killing him.

Ain't no worse thing in the world than fronting up against one of those, for a man with a cause, right or wrong, has got plenty to prove, and will make you suck sorrow if you get in the way of 'em wrongly.