Quotes About Gettysburg

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.

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means, and Bakke was an engagement whose antecedents were at Gettysburg and Shiloh.

Rations were scarcely issued, and the men about preparing supper, when rumors that the enemy had been encountered that day near Gettysburg absorbed every other interest, and very soon orders came to march forthwith to Gettysburg.

Gettysburg.… You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was 272 words and he delivered it under three minutes. He labored on it for days. The "featured speaker," Edward Everett, rambled on for two hours. Most people don't even remember his name, never mind what he said.

We entered Gettysburg in the afternoon, just in time to meet the enemy entering the town, and in good season to drive him back before his getting a foothold.

Resentment over the Civil War still lingered, in both the North and South. That conflict had concluded only fifty-three years earlier—Edison was a teenager when the first shots were fired, and Ford was born a few weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg.

And my parents live down in West Virginia, and I have to drive through the Shenandoah Valley pretty often to go visit them. You actually drive right by Gettysburg and some other spots where there were huge battles.

that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. - President Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg address, November 19, 1863

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945

Historians have determined that had Chamberlain not charged that day, the rebels would have won at Gettysburg.

raiders, the United States wanted Great Britain to foot the bill for the entire war cost after Gettysburg, some $2 billion, the logic being that after Gettysburg, the Confederacy had abandoned offensive operations, except at sea. If the British hadn't provided naval aid, the South couldn't have prolonged the war and Great Britain was therefore liable for the extra astronomical expenses incurred.

At the gatehouse of the town cemetery, a sign said, "All persons using firearms in these grounds will be prosecuted with the utmost rigor of the law." This sign had been put up long before the war came to Gettysburg. The words were ignored by soldiers on both sides for the next three days.

In two days, Lincoln wrote two completely different letters to the commanders who had won victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The letters reflected his quite different views of the two generals. Meade had fought well in a defensive posture in a battle he had not sought, but had failed to follow up that victory.

My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.

The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew

I've been to Gettysburg probably more than half a dozen times.

I think that in our earlier history--the Gettysburg Address or something--there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement. It was not simply the most efficient modern system or something. It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it.

According to the evidence available, the military did not keep a single ledger listing and locating all Confederate and Union graves on and around the Gettysburg battlefield.

If one thing is accomplished in this story of the aftermath of Gettysburg, it is the hope that we can dispel some of the pure nonsense and myth that has grown up surrounding the Civil War, and which is perpetuated even now by movies, novels, and battle reenactments around the country.

Quotes like these make one wonder as to the Commission's real purpose for being at Gettysburg, and brings to mind the words used by an overworked surgeon when he exclaimed, "I'd give 100 DD's [doctors of divinity] for one extra M.D. right now!

One hundred and fifty years after Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, equality for many Americans remains elusive.

The fact of the matter is that George G. Meade, unexpectedly and against the odds, thoroughly outgeneraled Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg.18

I remember working on movies like Gettysburg and feeling that Jeff Daniels was kind of a mentor.