U.S. History Quotes
>1-Three Worlds Meet
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“I was to go by way of the west, whence until today we do not know
with certainty that anyone has gone…”
Log of Christopher Columbus
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“This tactic, begun here…, spread throughout these Indies and will end
when there is no more land nor people to subjugate and destroy in this
part of the world.
Bartolome De Las Casas
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“Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such a
cruel and horrible servitude?…Are you not bound to love them as you
love yourselves? Don’t you understand this? Don’t you feel this?” Fray
Antonio de Montesinos
>
“Within a few days after our departure from every such town, the
people began to die very fast…in some towns about 20, in some towns
40,…The disease was so strange, that they neither knew what it was,
nor how to cure it.”
European explorer
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“Long before they had heard the word Spaniard, Native Americans had
properly organized states, wisely ordered by excellent laws, religion,
and custom.”
Bartolome de las Casas, 1550
U.S. History Quotes
>2-Colonization Begins
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“What man who is poor or who has only his merit to advance his fortunes can desire
more contentment than to walk over and plant land he has obtained by risking his
life?”
John Smith, The General History of Virginia
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“Thus we lived for the space of five months in this miserable distress… our men
night and day groaning in every corner of the fort…”
Jamestown colonist, A
New World
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“You see that power now rests wholly with me,… You must now obey this law,.. He
that will not work shall not eat.”
John Smith, 1607
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“sixtie men, women and children, most miserable and poore creatures; and those
were preserved for the most part, by roots, herbes, acornes, walnuts, berries, now
and then a little fish…yea, even the very skinnes of our horses.”
John Smith,
1609
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“This filthie noveltie…a custome loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose,
harmeful to the brains, and dangerous to the lungs.”
King James of England
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“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people
are on us.”
John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity
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“Forced religion stinks in the nostrils of God”
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“the Holy Spirit illuminates the heart of every true believer.”
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“You have rather been a Husband than a Wife, and a Preacher than a Hearer, and
a Magistrate than a subject.”
John Winthrop at Hutchinson’s trial
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“a dangerous instrument of the Devil, raised up by Satan amongst us…The
misgovernment of this woman’s tongue has been a great cause of this disorder.”
Puritan Minister, 1637
Roger Williams
Anne Hutchinson
U.S. History Quotes
>3-Colonies in America
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“Now I would have you well observe, that I am very sensible of the
unkindness and injustices that has been too much exercised towards
you…But I am not such a man…I have great love and regard toward you,
and I desire to win and gain your love and friendship by a kind, just,
and peaceable life…”
William Penn
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“Let men be good. And the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they
will cure it.”
William Penn
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“Forced religion stinks in the nostrils of God”
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“To prohibit a great people, from making all that they can of every
part of their own produce,…is a manifest violation of the most sacred
rights of mankind.”
Adam Smith, 1776
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“any man whatever that is but willing to take…pains may be assured of
a most comfortable subsistence[life], and…raise his fortunes far beyond
what he could ever hope for in England.”
Proprietors of Carolina
Roger Williams
U.S. History Quotes
>4-Colonial Life
>
We please ourselves with the prospect of exporting in a few years a
good quantity from hence and supplying our mother country with a
manufacture for which she has so great a demand…”
Eliza Pinckney
from South Carolina
>
“A colonist cannot make a button, a horseshoe, nor a hobnail, but some
snooty ironmonger or respectable buttonmaker of Britain shall bawl and
squall that his honor’s worship is most egregiously maltreated, injured,
cheated, and robbed by the rascally American republicans.”
Boston
Gazette, 1765
>
The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate, added to the
number in the ship….almost suffocated us…The shrieks of the women
and the groans of the dying rendered the whole a scene of horror.”
Olaudah Equiano, 1755
>
“My wife and I had another scold about mending my shoes, but it was
soon over by her submission.”
William Byrd’s Diary from Virginia
>
“Wives are part of the House and Family, and ought to be under a
Husband’s Government; they should Obey their own Husbands.”
Puritan clergyman
>
“The God that holds you over the pit of Hell,…abhors you… his wrath
towards you burns like fire… and yet it is nothing but his hand that
holds you from falling into the fire every moment.”
Jonathan
Edwards, “Sinners in the Hans of an Angry God”
U.S. History Quotes
>5-Beginnings of the Rebellion
>
“The French have built so many forts that the British settlements
almost seem surrounded.” Alexander Spotswood, Virginia, 1718
>
What will future generations think of us? The trade of the whole
continent is taxed by Parliament. Stamps and other internal duties and
taxes are discussed. But there is not one petition to the king and
Parliament urging the ending of these injustices……James Otis, 1764
>
The British government in all future generations may be sure that the
American colonies will never try to leave Britain’s rule unless driven to
it as the last desperate action against oppression. It will be an
oppression that will make the wisest person mad and the weakest
person strong…James Otis, 1764
>
“We the Daughters of the Patriots who have and do appear for the
public interest…do with pleasure engage with them in denying ourselves
the drinking of foreign tea, in hopes to frustrate a plan that tends to
deprive the whole community of…all that is valuable in life.”
Group
of Boston women
>
“That the only representatives of the people of these colonies, are
persons chosen therein by themselves, and that no taxes ever have
been, or can be constitutionally imposed on them, but by their
respective legislatures.”
Resolution of the Stamp Act Congress
U.S. History Quotes
>6-American Revolution Begins
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“among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; second, to liberty; third,
to property; together with the right to support and to defend them in the best manner they can.”
Samuel Adams
“In about three hours…we had thus broken and thrown overboard every tea chest to be found in the
ship, while those in the other ships were disposing of the tea in the same way.”
George Hewes,
1773
“We are informed that you have unwisely taken charge of a quantity of tea which has been sent out
by the East India Company as a trial of American virtue and resolution. Now, your cargo, on your
arrival here, will most assuredly bring you into hot water.”
Letter to a Ship Captain
“I find that ‘Common Sense’ is working a powerful change in the minds of many men”
George
Washington, April 1776
“All the hills on each side of us were covered with rebels…so that they kept the road always lined
and a very hot fire on us without intermission…”
British Soldier, April 1775
“If we wish to be free—if we mean to preserve those privileges for which we have been fighting so
long—if we do not mean to abandon the noble struggle in which we have so long been engaged—we
must fight! I repeat it, we must fight! An appeal to weapons and to God is all that is left us.”
Patrick Henry
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid
it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give
me death!”
Patrick Henry
“Filled with sentiments of duty to your majesty… we present this petition only to obtain redress of
grievances and relief from fears and jealousies occasioned by the system of statutes and
regulations, adopted since the close of the late war.”
Letter to King George from the Congress
“The sun never shone on a cause of greater worth”
Thomas Paine
“Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping
voice of nature cries, ‘Tis time to part.”
Thomas Paine
“The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries—it is time to be reconciled. It is high
time that those who are connected by the ties of religion, kinship, and country, should resume their
former friendship and be united in the bond of mutual affection”
Charles Inglis, Loyalist
“these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent States.”
Richard
Henry Lee, June 7, 1776
“all men are created equal…”
Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
“certain unalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
“We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.”
Thomas
Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political
bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the
separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent
respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to
the separation”
Declaration of Independence
“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it”
Declaration of Independence
U.S. History Quotes
>7-Revolutionary War
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“These are the times which try men’s souls.”
Thomas Paine, “Crisis”
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“To see men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without blankets
to lay on, without shoes….marching through frost and snow…and
submitting to it without a murmur, is a mark of patience and obedience
which in my opinion can scarcely be paralleled.”
George Washington
at Valley Forge
>
“The moment I knew she (America) was fighting for freedom, I burnt
with the desire of bleeding for her.”
Marquis de Lafayette
>
“Thousands were without blankets, and were obliged to warm
themselves over fires all night…It was not uncommon to track the
march of the men over ice and frozen ground by the blood from their
naked feet.”
Colonial Soldier, 1777
>
“The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink
from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves
the love and thanks of man and woman.”
Thomas Paine
>
“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly”
Thomas Paine
U.S. History Quotes
>8-Articles of Confederation / Constitutional
Convention
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“The consequences of…inefficient government are too obvious to be dwelt upon. Thirteen
sovereignties pulling against each other, and all tugging at the federal head, will soon bring ruin upon
the whole…”
George Washington
>
“The more experience I acquire, the stronger is my conviction that unlimited power can not be
safely trusted to any man or set of men on earth…Power of all kinds has an irresistible propensity to
increase a desire for itself.”
North Carolina Citizen
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“Whenever any state shall have sixty thousand free inhabitants therein, such state shall be
admitted…into the Congress of the United States, on an equal footing with the original States in all
respects whatever.”
Northwest Ordinance, 1787
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“In determining questions in the United States in Congress assembled, each State shall have one
vote. …”
Articles of Confederation
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“The United States in Congress assembled shall never engage in a war, nor enter into any treaties
or alliances, nor coin money, nor …..unless nine States assent to the same…”
Articles of
Confederation
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“It was natural that a people so enthusiastic for liberty should grant their Congress only a shadow
of dignity and watch its proceedings carefully” Foreign Traveler
>
“You are not to inquire how your trade will be increased… but how your liberties can be secured.”
Patrick Henry on the Constitution debate
>
“They… divided the powers, that each might be a check upon the other
reasonable man will agree to it.”
Alexander Hamilton
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“I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights…Let me add, that a bill
of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth…and what no
government should refuse.”
Thomas Jefferson
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“I think all the good of this new Constitution might have been couched in three or four new Articles,
to be added to the good, old, and venerable fabric.
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“Tis really astonishing that the same people, who have just emerged from along and cruel war in
defense of liberty, should now agree to fix an elective despotism upon themselves and their
posterity.”
Richard Henry Lee
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“The Constitution is said to have beautiful features; but when I come to examine these features,
Sir, they appear to me horridly frightful:…Where are the checks in this government?”
Patrick
Henry
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“I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such, because I think a general
government is necessary for us.
I doubt, too, whether any other convention would be able to
make a better constitution.”
Ben Franklin
and I presume that every
U.S. History Quotes
>9-Constitution / Bill of Rights
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“The Constitution was not made to fit us like a straightjacket. In its
elasticity lies its chief greatness.”
Woodrow Wilson
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“It appears to me, then, little short of a miracle that the delegates
from so many states…should unite informing a system of national
government.”
George Washington
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“It astonishes me to find this system approaching to near perfection as
it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies.”
Benjamin Franklin
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“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
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If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on
government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be
administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you
must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the
next place oblige it to control itself”
James Madison, Federalist
#51
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“I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of
rights…Let me add, that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled
to against every government on earth…and what no government should
refuse.”
Thomas Jefferson
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“If I shall be in the minority, I shall have those powerful sensations
which arise from a conviction of being overpowered in a good cause. Yet
I will be a peaceful citizen. My head, my hand, and my heart, shall be
at liberty to…remove the defects of that system in a constitutional
way.”
Patrick Henry
U.S. History Quotes
>10-Washington
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“We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us.”
Madison
James
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“He smote the rock of the natural resources, and abundant streams of
revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead corpse of public credit, and it
sprung upon its feet.”
Daniel Webster
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“I am …bringing the voice of the people and a good name of my own on this
voyage; but what returns will be made of them, Heaven alone can foretell.”
George Washington
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“A National debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing; it
will be a powerful cement of our new nation. It will also create a necessity
for keeping up taxation…which without being oppressive will be a spur to
industry…”
Alexander Hamilton
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“Necessary often means no more than needful, useful, or helpful to. And this
is the true sense in which it is to be understood as used in the Constitution.
It was the intent of the Convention to give a liberal latitude to the exercise
of the specified powers.”
Alexander Hamilton
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“The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending
our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as
possible”
George Washington
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“As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit.
One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible”
George
Washington
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“Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and
harmony with all.”
George Washington
U.S. History Quotes
>11-Federalist Era-Adams
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“Millions for defense, but not one dime for tribute.”
in 1798
Popular slogan
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“I will never send another minister to France without assurances that
he will be received, respected, and honored as the representative of a
great, free, powerful, and independent nation.”
President John
Adams, 1798
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“The reign of Mr. Adams has, hitherto, been one continued tempest of
malignant passions. As President he has never opened his lips, or lifted
his pen, without threatening and scolding…to destroy every man who
differs from his opinions.”
James Callender, 1800
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“That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish… any false,
scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of
the United States…shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two
thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two
years…Sedition Act, 1798
U.S. History Quotes
>12-Jeffersonian Era
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“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,…We are
all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”
Thomas Jefferson’s 1st
Inaugural
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“The Great Spirit gave this land to his red children.”
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“Mr. President, if you know what is good for your future welfare you
will take off the embargo that is now such a check upon American
commerce…”
New England merchant, 1808
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“White people…have driven us from the great salt water, forced us
over the mountains, and would shortly push us into the lakes. But we
are determined to go no farther. The only way to stop this evil is for
all red men to unite.”
Tecumseh
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“It has paralyzed industry…Our fertile lands are reduced to sterility.
It will drive our seamen into foreign employ, and our fisherman to
foreign sandbanks…It has dried up our revenue.” Philip Key,
Congressmen
Tecumseh
U.S. History Quotes
>13-Early 1800’s Politics
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“We had a battle…and I am still within sound of the cannon!…May God
protect us! A wagon has been procured, and I have had it filled
with…the most valuable portable articles…”
Dolly Madison, 1814
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“I prefer the troubled sea of war, demanded by the honor and
independence of this country, with all its calamities and desolation,
to…peace.”
Henry Clay
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“The Missouri question…is the most portentous one which ever yet
threatened our Union. In the gloomiest moment of the Revolutionary
War I never had any apprehensions equal to what I feel from this
source.”
Thomas Jefferson
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“I take it for granted that the present question is a mere preamble- a
title page to a great, tragic volume.”
John Quincy Adams
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“the American continents,… are henceforth not to be considered as
subjects for future colonization by any European powers. . .”
James
Monroe
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“The war had renewed and reinstated the National feelings and
character, which the Revolution had given…The people…are more
American: they feel and act more as a nation.”
Albert Gallatin,
U.S. Minister to France
U.S. History Quotes
>14-Sectional Differences
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“I am here, among strangers- a factory girl-yes, a factory girl; that
name which is thought so degrading by many, though, in truth I see nor
feel its degradation.”
Lowell Mill worker, 1845
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“For liberty our fathers fought, Which with their blood, they dearly
bought. The factory system sets at naught. A slave at morn, a slave
at eve, It doth my innermost feelings grieve; The blood runs chilly
from my heart, To see fair Liberty depart.”
Poet Thomas Man
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“One of my objects is to form the tools so the tools themselves shall
fashion the work and give to every part its just proportion- which…will
give expedition, uniformity, and exactness to the whole.”
Eli
Whitney
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“will create the greatest inland trade ever witnessed… All their
surplus…will concentrate in the city of New York.”
NY Governor
Dewitt Clinton, 1817
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“The circulation of steamboats is as necessary to the West, as that of
the blood is to the human system.”
European traveler, 1830’s
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“It is the Devil’s own invention, compounded of fire, smoke, soot, and
dirt, spreading its infernal poison throughout the countryside.”
U.S. History Quotes
>15-Age of Jackson
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“Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable”
Webster on the Nullification Crisis, 1830
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“Disunion by armed force is treason.”
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“ It will be my sincere and constant desire to observe toward the
Indian tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy, and to give that
humane and considerate attention to their rights and their wants which
is consistent with the habits of our Government and the feelings of our
people.”
Andrew Jackson, 1829
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“It is rumored and believed by everybody here that Mr. Clay will be
made Secretary of State…What a farce! That Mr. Adams should swear
to support the Constitution…which he purchased from
Representatives…and which he must distribute among them as rewards
for the iniquity.”
Andrew Donelson
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>
Daniel
President Andrew Jackson
“The Union-next to our Liberty, most dear”
John C. Calhoun
>
“How many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the
opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions! If the offers
made to the Indians were extended to them, they would be hailed with
gratitude and joy.”
Andrew Jackson
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“It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements
of whites…; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and
under their own rude institutions;…to cast off their savage habits and
become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community…”
Andrew
Jackson
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“Our federal Union, it must be preserved.”
Andrew Jackson
U.S. History Quotes
>16-Era of Reform
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“What is a man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what man has made;
a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good…”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“…that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to
live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common
hours…” Henry David Thoreau “Walden”
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“If we do not prepare children to become good citizens…if we do not enrich their
minds with knowledge, then our republic must go down to destruction, as others
have gone before it.”
Horace Mann, 1837
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“We are natives of this country. We only ask that we be treated as well as
foreigners.”
Black Pastor from New York
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“The man who would not fight…ought to be kept with all his children or family, in
slavery or in chains to be butchered by his cruel enemies.”
David Walker, 1829
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“I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane
persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens!
Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience”
Dorothea Dix
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“An educated people is always a more industrious and productive people. Intelligence
is a primary ingredient in the wealth of nations. …”
Horace Mann
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“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to
amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them
at once?”
Henry David Thoreau
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“The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery…All
distinctions founded on complexion ought to be…abolished, and every right, privilege,
and immunity, now enjoyed by the white man, ought to be as freely granted to the
man of color.”
Frederick Douglas, North Star
U.S. History Quotes
>17-Mid-1800’s Reform
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“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” Seneca Falls
Declaration
“There is no reform in which women can act better or more appropriately than
temperance…Oh! The misery, the utter, hopeless misery of the drunkard’s wife!”
Mary Vaughn
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“…but I believe they will find that woman as their equal is unquestionably more
valuable than woman as their inferior both as a moral and intellectual being.”
Sarah Grimke
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“Every morning the bells pealed forth the same clangor, and every night brought
the same fatigue. But Susan felt, as all factory girls feel, that she could bear it
for a while…Money is their object- not for itself, but for what it can perform…”
F.G.A. Lowell Offering, 1841
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“I regard my workpeople just as I regard my machinery.”
1840’s
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“If persecution is the means which God has ordained for the accomplishment of this
great end; then…Let It Come; for it is my deep, solemn, deliberate conviction, that
this is a cause worth dying for.”
Angelina Grimke
>
“In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of
the woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in
every woman’s heart until she bows down to it no longer.”
Lucy Stone
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America is a country in which fortunes have yet to be made…All cannot be made
wealthy, but all have a chance of securing a prize. This stimulates to the race, and
hence the eagerness of the competition.
Alexander MacKay, The Western
World
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“If one could stop when one wanted, and if one were not locked up in a box with 50
or 60 tobacco-chewers;…and the smell of the smoke, of the oil, and of the chimney
did not poison one…it would be the perfection of traveling.”
Samuel Beck,
American Railroads
Textile Mill Manager,
U.S. History Quotes
>18-Manifest Destiny
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“Why should we weep to sail in search of fortune? Cheer for the west, the new and
happy land.”
Ignatius Donnelly
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“We womenfolk visited from wagon to wagon…ever westward, and talking over our
home life back in the ‘states’; telling of the loved ones left behind; voicing our
hopes for the future…” Catherine Haun, Frontier Women
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“Fifty-four Forty or Fight”
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“Texas needs peace, and alocal government; its inhabitants are farmers, and they
need a calm and quiet life…But my efforts to serve Texas involved me in the
labyrinth of Mexican politics…Can this state of things exist without precipitating the
country into war? I think it cannot.”
Stephen Austin, Lone Star: A History of
Texas
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“Remember the Alamo”
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“You have no idea what a horrible sight a field of battle is.”
1846
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“The lives of Mexicans are sacrificed in this cause.”
Senator
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“The department of Texas is contiguous to the most avid nation in the world…They
incite uprising in the territory in question.”
General Manuel Teran, Mexico
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“I shall never surrender or retreat…I call on you in the name of liberty, of
patriotism and everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid…”
Alamo Leader William Travis
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“That this journey is … perilous, the deaths of many will testify… and often as I
passed the freshly made graves, I have glanced at the side boards of the wagon,
not knowing how soon it might serve as the coffin for some one of us.”
Lodisa
Frizzel
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“…Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory
and shed American blood upon American soil…War exists.”
President James K.
Polk, 1846
Popular Slogan in 1844 Presidential Election
Robert E. Lee,
Charles Sumner, Mass.
U.S. History Quotes
>19-Long Term Causes of the Civil War
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Can we as a nation continue together permanently-forever-half slave
and half free?”
Abraham Lincoln
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“I tell you, the prospect ahead is dark, cloudy, thick, and gloomy.”
Alexander Stephens, The Coming of the Civil War
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“There’s two things I got a right to and these are Death and Liberty.
One or the other I mean to have.”
Harriet Tubman
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“. Abolition and the Union cannot coexist. As the friend of the Union I
openly proclaim it, - and the sooner it is known the better. The former
may now be controlled, but in a short time it will be beyond the power
of man to arrest the course of events. We of the South will not,
cannot, surrender our institutions”
John C. Calhoun
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“That any person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct, hinder, or
prevent such claimant, his agent or attorney…from arresting such a
fugitive from service or labor… be subject to a fine not exceeding one
thousand dollars, and imprisonment not exceeding six months, by
indictment and conviction …”
Fugitive Slave Law
U.S. History Quotes
>20-Immediate Causes of the Civil War
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“If the people of Kansas want a slaveholding state, let them have it, and if they
want a free state they have a right to it, and it is not for the people of Illinois,
or Missouri, or New York, or Kentucky, to complain, whatever the decision of the
people of Kansas may be.”
Stephen Douglas, The Civil War by Geoffrey Ward
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“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
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“Slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless its supported by local
police regulations.”
Stephen Douglas
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“The time for compromise has now passed.”
>
“This country will be drenched in blood…The people of the North are not going to
let the country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it…Only in spirit and
determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared.”
William Tecumseh Sherman
>
“Gentlemen of the slave states,…We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of
Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is …right.” NY Senator Seward
>
“This atrocious decision furnishes final confirmation of the already well-known fact
that, under the Constitution and government of the U.S., the colored people are
nothing and can be nothing but an alien, disenfranchised, and degraded class.”
Robert Purvis
>
“It matters not what way the Supreme Court may…decide; the people have the
lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please….If the people are
opposed to slavery, they will elect representatives…who will by unfriendly legislation
effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst…”
Stephen Douglas,
Freeport Doctrine, 1858
>
“The history of the …Republican party of the North is a history of repeated
injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute
tyranny over the slaveholding states…The South has compromised until she can
compromise no farther.”
New Orleans Newspaper Editorial
>
“I have, may it please the Court, a few words to say. In the first place, I deny
everything but what I have all along admitted, of a design on my part to free
slaves”
John Brown
Abraham Lincoln, 1858
Jefferson Davis
U.S. History Quotes
>21-Behind the Civil War
>
“What ever may be the result of the contest, I foresee that the
country will have to pass through a terrible ordeal…for our national
sins.”
Robert E. Lee
>
“"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the
institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no
lawful right to do so”
Abraham Lincoln, 1861
>
“My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and is
not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union
without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by
freeing all the slaves, I would do it…”
Abraham Lincoln
>
“All persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a
state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United
States, shall be then, thenceforth, and forever free…”
Abraham
Lincoln, Emancipation Proclamation
>
“Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.;
let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and
bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny
that he has earned the right to citizenship.”
Frederick Douglas
U.S. History Quotes
>22-Civil War
>
“no terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be
accepted.”
General Ulysses S. Grant
>
“Your hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy is…repeated…But you
must act.”
President Abraham Lincoln
>
“More than half a mile their front extends…man touching man, rank
pressing rank…the arms of thousands of men, barrel and
bayonet…magnificent, grim, irresistible.” Union Officer Frank Haskell,
July 3rd 1863
>
“About three miles from Sparta we struck the ‘burnt country’…The
fields were trampled down and the road was lined with carcasses of
horses, hogs, and cattle that the invaders, unable to consume or to
carry away with them, had wantonly shot down, to starve the people
and prevent them from making their crops…” Georgia resident Eliza
Andrews
>
“Well, it is over now. The battle is lost, and many of us are prisoners,
many are dead, many wounded, bleeding, and dying. Your soldier lives
and mourns. If it were not for you, my darling, he would rather…be
back there with his dead, to sleep for all time in an unknown grave.”
George Pickett, July 1863
U.S. History Quotes
>23-Legacy of the War
>
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for
crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist
within the United States.” 13th Amendment to the Constitution
>
“I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your
bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved
and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so
costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom”
President Lincoln
>
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the
work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds”
President Lincoln,
1865
U.S. History Quotes
>24-Reconstruction after the Civil War
>
“Nothing in all history equaled this wonderful, quiet, sudden
transformation of four million human beings from…the auction block to
the ballot box.”
William Lloyd Garrison
>
“With malice toward none, with charity for all…let us strive on to finish
the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who
shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan, to do all
which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves
and with all nations.”
Abraham Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural
>
“I say, as to the leaders, punishment. I say leniency, conciliation, and
amnesty to the thousands whom they have misled and deceived.”
Andrew Johnson
>
“We are not prepared for this suffrage. But we can learn. Give a man
tools and let him use them and in time he will learn a trade. So it is
with voting. We may not understand it at the start, but in time we
shall learn to do our duty.” William Nash
>
“We have turned, or are about to turn, loose four million slaves without
a hut to shelter them or a cent in their pockets. ... This Congress is
bound to provide for them until they can take care of themselves. If
we do not furnish them with homesteads, and hedge them around with
protective laws; if we leave them to the legislation of their late
masters, we had better have left them in bondage.”
Thaddeus
Stevens
U.S. History Quotes
>25-Reconstruction-End of Slavery
>
“I came to Virginia one year ago….Erected a school, organized and
named the Freedman’s Chapel School…have about 60 who have been for
several months engaged in the study of arithmetic, writing, etc…their
progress has been surprisingly rapid.” Robert Fitzgerald from Delaware,
1867
>
“Many of the grown people are desirous of learning to read. It is
wonderful how a people who have been so long crushed to the
earth…can have so great a desire for knowledge.”
Charlotte Forten
>
“For we colored people did not know how to be free and the white
people did not know how to have a free colored person about them.”
Houston Holloway
U.S. History Quotes
>26-Reconstruction Ends
>
“We have built up your country. We have worked in your fields, and
garnered your harvests, for two hundred and fifty years! Do we ask
you for compensation….? We are willing to let the dead past bury its
dead; but we ask you now for our rights.” Black Georgia Representative
Henry Turner, 1868
>
“The Klan broke down my door, took me out of bed, took me to the
woods and whipped me for thee hours or more and left me for dead.”
Abram Colby, Georgia
>
“The new South presents a perfect democracy…a hundred farms for
every plantation…and a diversified industry that meets the complex
need of this complex age.”
Atlanta Journalist Henry Grady, 1896
“We believe you are not familiar with the description of the Ku Klux
Klan’s riding nightly over the country….spreading terror wherever they
go….we pray that you will take some steps to remedy these evils.”
Report to Congress
>
U.S. History Quotes
>27-Plains Indians
>
“My people have always been the friend of white men. Why are you in such a
hurry?”
Chief Joseph, 1877
>
“We have been taught to hunt and live on the game. You tell us that we must learn
to farm, live in one house, and take on your ways. Suppose the people living beyond
the great sea should come and tell you that you must stop farming, and kil your
cattle, and take your houses and land, what would you do? Would you not fight
them?” Sioux warrior Gall
>
“It makes little difference…where one opens the record of the history of the
Indians; every page and every year has its dark stains.”
Helen Hunt Jackson, A
Century of Dishonor
>
“kill the Indian and save the man”
>
“Wherever the whites are established, the buffalo is gone, and the red hunter
must die of hunger.”
Sioux Chief
>
“. Hear me, my chiefs, my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I
will fight no more against the white man”
Chief Joseph
>
“There is not among these three hundred bands of Indians one which has not
suffered cruelly at the hands either of the Government or of white settlers”
Helen Hunt Jackson
>
“I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill
of old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and
scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still
young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was
buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”
Black Elk
>
“The history of the Government connections with the Indians is a shameful record
of broken treaties and unfulfilled promises.”
Helen Hunt Jackson
Richard Pratt of the Carlisle School
U.S. History Quotes
>28-Ranching and Mining
>
“I would put in the fall and winter telling about the big things I had
seen up north. The next spring I would have the same old trip, the
same old things would happen in the same old way…I put in 18 or 20
years on the trail, and all I had in the final outcome was the high
heeled boots, the striped pants, and about $4.80 worth of other
clothes.”
G.D. Burrows, cowboy
>
We went back to look for him, and we found him…horse and man
mashed into the ground as flat as a pancake….We tried to think that
lightning hit him, and that was what we wrote his folks..but we couldn’t
believe it ourselves. I’m afraid it wasn’t the lightning. I’m afraid..
They both went down before the stampede.” Teddy Abbott, cowboy
U.S. History Quotes
>29-Life on the Plains
>
“I think…it took more to live twenty-four hours at a time, month in and
out, on the lonely and lovely prairie, without giving up to loneliness.”
Esther Clark Hill, Kansas
>
“Now…the frontier has gone and with its going has closed the first
period of American history.” Frederick Jackson Turner
>
“No other system of taxation has borne as heavily on the people as
those extortions and inequalities of railroad charges”
Henry
Demarest Lloyd, 1881 Atlantic Monthly
U.S. History Quotes
>30-Farmers and the Populists
>
“What you farmers need to do is raise less corn and more hell!”
Mary Elizabeth Lease
>
“We reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile
prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will
spring up again as if by magic; destroy our farms and the grass will
grow in the streets of every city in the country…”
William Jennings
Bryan, Democratic Convention Speech, 1896
>
“Having behind us the producing mass of this nation…we answer their
demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press
down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify
man upon a cross of Gold.”
William Jennings Bryan, Democratic
Convention Speech, 1896
>
“We demand free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold at the ...
ratio of sixteen to one”
Omaha Platform, 1892
>
“That we oppose any subsidy or national aid to any private corporation
for any purpose”
Omaha Platform, 1892
>
“There are three great crops raised in Nebraska. One is a crop of
corn, one is a crop of freight rates, and one is a crop of interest. One
is produced by farmers who sweat and toil the land. The other two are
produced by men who sit in their offices…and farm the farmers.”
Nebraska Newspaper Editorial
>
“We believe that the time has come when the railroad corporations will
either own the people or the people must own the railroads”
Omaha
Platform, 1892
U.S. History Quotes
>31-Industrial Development
>
In their delirium of greed the managers of our transportation systems
disregard both private and public welfare.”
James Weaver, Populist
Candidate, 1892
>
“The public be damned”
>
“We sat and looked and the lamp continued to burn and the longer it
burned the more fascinated we were.”
Thomas Edison
>
“At one time we were using at least ten thousand animals, and most of
the time from eight to ten thousand laborers…”
Grenville Dodge
>
“The trains pulled up facing each other, each crowded with
workmen…Prayer was offered; a number of spikes were driven…and thus
the two roads were welded into one great trunk line from the Atlantic
to the Pacific.”
Grenville Dodge, 1869
Vanderbilt
U.S. History Quotes
>32-Growth of Big Business
>
“The man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during
life, will pass away “unwept, unhonored, and unsung’…Of such as these the public verdict will then
be:’The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”
Andrew Carnegie, 1889
>
“The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few…and the
possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty.”
Populist Platform, 1892
>
I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.
>
"I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people's efforts than 100% of my own efforts.“
Rockefeller
>
"God gave me my money. I believe the power to make money is a gift from God . to be developed
and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I
possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make
for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.“
>
The only question with wealth is, what do you do with it?
>
Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.
Rockefeller
>
Competition is a sin.
>
Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right
thing.
John D. Rockefeller
>
There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.
Carnegie
>
Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the
good of the community.
Andrew Carnegie
>
And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race,
because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.
Andrew Carnegie
>
The public be damned.
John D. Rockefeller
John D.
John D. Rockefeller
John D.
John D. Rockefeller
William Henry Vanderbilt
Andrew
U.S. History Quotes
>33-Workers Unite
>
“…I can never get a day’s work under that company or any other around here,
for…I’ll be blacklisted. Then what will my wife and my babies do?”
American
Worker
>
“The militant, not the meek, shall inherit the earth.”
>
“When I was younger, girls learned full trades, now they do not- one stitch seams,
another makes buttonholes, and another sews on the buttons. Once girls learned to
do all these things…Now you see then in those shops, seated in long rows, crowded
together in a hot, close atmosphere…working at 20 and 25 cents a day.”
Aurora
Phelps
>
“For more than twenty years have the wage workers of this country begged and
prayed their masters, the factory lords, to reduce their burdens. It has been in
vain.”
August Spies at Haymarket Square
>
“The bulk of the sweater’s work in done in the tenements, which the law that
regulates factory labor does not reach…”
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
>
“Show me the country in which there is no strikes, and I will show you the country
in which there is no liberty.”
Samuel Gompers
>
“The mill itself was hell: A roar of a hundred lions, a thunder as of cannons…jarring
clang of falling iron, burst of fluttering flakes of fire, scream of terrible saws,
shifting of mighty trucks with hiss of steam.” Hamlin Garland on a steel mill,
McClure’s Magazine
>
“They have grown rich and powerful on your labor. They amass stupendous fortunes,
while you, who bring them into existence, are suffering from want. In answer to
your pleadings they ask for the bodies of your little children, to utilize them in
their gold mints, to make dollars out of them!”
August Spies, Haymarket Square
>
can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
Mother Jones
Jay Gould
U.S. History Quotes
>34-Urban Experience
>
We cannot all live in the city, yet nearly all seem determined to do
so.”
Horace Greeley
>
“America…We were so near it seemed too much to believe. Everyone
stood silent- like in prayer…Then we were entering the harbor. The
land came so near we could almost reach out and touch it..everyone
was holding their breath…”
Rosa Cavalleri, Italian immigrant
>
“There she lies, the great Melting Pot”
author
>
“I looked about the narrow streets…ragged clothes, dirty bedding
oozing out of the windows, ashcans and garbage cans cluttering the
sidewalks. A vague sadness pressed down on my heart-the first doubt
of America.”
Anzia Yezierska, Russian Immigrant
>
“Presently she established a kindergarten, a gymnasium, evening
classes, clubs for young people and clubs for old people, and a day
nursery where workingwomen might leave their children. As her work
advanced she experienced the need of more room and several buildings
were added to the original brick Hull House”
Ray Baker
>
“"one half of the world does not know how the other half lives." That
was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that
was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of
those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there”
Jacob Riis
>
“Suppose we look into a tenement on Cherry Street…Listen! That short
hacking cough, that tiny helpless cry…The child is dying of measles.
With half a chance it might have lived. But it had none. That dark
bedroom killed it.”
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
Israel Zangwill, British
U.S. History Quotes
>35-The Gilded Age
>
“I’ve been called a boss. All there is to it is having friends, doing
things for people, and then later on they’ll do things for you…I never
coerced anybody in my life.”
James Pendergast, Missouri
>
“I don’t care what the papers write about me-my constituents can’t
read- but… they can see pictures.”
William “Boss” Tweed, NY
>
“Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning.”
James Garfield
>
“He (Cleveland) asked what big question he ought to take up when he
got into the White House. I told him…the tariff.” Carl Schurz
U.S. History Quotes
>36-Imperialism Begins
>
“The Hawaiian pear is now ripe, and this is the golden hour…to pluck
it.” John Stevens, US Ambassador
>
“Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and
shall be ours…We will establish trading-posts throughout the world as
distributing points for American products.”
Senator Albert
Beveridge
>
“No man’s life, no man’s property is safe in Cuba…Cuba will soon be a
wilderness of blackened ruin…Is there no nation wise enough, brave
enough to aid this blood-smitten land?”
James Creelman for New
York World, 1896
>
“Libre Cuba”
>
“You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”
Hearst to illustrator Frederick Remington in Cuba
>
“Remember the Maine”
>
“A splendid little war”
>
“there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to
educate the Filipinos and uplift and Christianize them.”
President
William McKinley
Popular Cuban slogan
William Randolph
Secretary of State John Hay
U.S. History Quotes
>37-World Power
>
“The exports of the U.S. this year (1898) are greater than those of
any other nation in the world….The fact that the U.S. has none
(colonies) does not prevent her products and manufactures from
invading…all parts of the world”
Andrew Carnegi
>
“safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with
all parts of the Chinese Empire.”
Secretary of State John Hay
>
“It is not necessary to own people to trade with them.”
Jennings Bryan
>
“Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”
Roosevelt
William
Theodore
U.S. History Quotes
>38-Turn of the Century Life
>
“They hits ye if yer don’t learn, and they hits ye if ye whisper, and
they hits ye if ye have string in yer pocket, and they hits ye if ye
seat sqeaks, and they hits ye if ye don’t stan’ up in time, and they hits
ye if ye late, and they hits ye if ye forget the page.” Young student in
school in Chicago
>
“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what
we will.”
Popular Union Slogan
>
“I think bicycling has done more to emancipate women than anything
else in the world. It gives women a freedom and self-reliance.”
Susan B. Anthony, 1880’s
>
“The Greatest Show on Earth”
P.T. Barnum
U.S. History Quotes
>39-Discrimination
>
“We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political
ideas…and the greatest of those ideals is that all men are created equal.”
W.E.B. DuBois
>
“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a
field as in writing a poem.” Booker T. Washington
>
“opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of
Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race
terrorized.” Ida B. Wells
>
“In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,
yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
Booker T.
Washington, Atlanta Compromise, 1895
>
“In the eyes of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling
class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind and
neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights,
all citizens are equal before the law.”
John Marshall Harlan, Supreme
Court Justice, 1896
>
“Nothing else so soon brings about right relations between the two races in
the South as the industrial progress of the negro. Friction between the races
will pass away in proportion as the black man, by reason of his skill,
intelligence, and character, can produce something that the white man wants
or respects in the commercial world.”
Booker T. Washington
>
“The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.
The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with
the Talented Tenth”
W.E.B. DuBois
>
“We do not believe in violence, neither in the despised violence of the raid
nor the lauded violence of the soldier, nor the barbarous violence of the
mob, but we do believe in John Brown, in that incarnate spirit of justice,
that hatred of a lie, that willingness to sacrifice money, reputation, and life
itself on the altar of right.”
Niagara Convention
U.S. History Quotes
>40-Progressives
>
“Competition was natural enough at one time, but do you think you are
competing today? Many of you think you are competing. Against whom?
Against Rockefeller? About as I would if I had a wheelbarrow and
competed aginst the Santa Fe from here to Kansas City.”
Eugene V.
Debs
>
“Mr. Rockefeller has systematically played with loaded dice, and it is
doubtful if there has been a time since 1872 when he has run a race
with a competitor and started fair.” Ida Tarbell, History of Standard
Oil
>
“The term Progressive…suggests certain ideas of
government….Governments were established among men to protect the
weak from the strong…A Progressive…suggests governmental action to
prevent…further abuse.”
Progressive Writer
>
“Insanitary housing, poisonous sewage, contaminated water, infant
mortality, the spread of contagion…dangerous occupations, juvenile
crime, unwholesome crowding…are the enemies which the modern city
must face and overcome would it survive.”
Jane Addams
U.S. History Quotes
>41-Progressive Reforms
>
“There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt
and sawdust, where the workers had spit countless billions of
consumption(tuberculosis) germs.”
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
>
“DO YOU KNOW one single sound, logical reason why the intelligence
and individuality of women should not entitle them to the rights and
privileges of self-government?”
Carrie Chatman Catt
>
“There were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which
a poisoned rat was a tidbit.”
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
>
“The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred.
There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 143 of us are
burned to death.”
Rose Schneiderman
U.S. History Quotes
>42-Roosevelt as a Progressive
>
“In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line
hard.”
Theodore Roosevelt
>
“It is the duty of the President to act upon the theory that he is the
steward of the people, and…to assume that he has the legal right to do
whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or
the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.”
Theodore Roosevelt
>
“The man who advocates destroying the trusts by measures which would
paralyze the industries of the country is at least a quack, and at worst
an enemy of the Republic.”
Theodore Roosevelt
>
“We recognize and are bound to war against the evils of today.”
Theodore Roosevelt
>
“Thousands of … over civilized people are beginning to find out that
going to the mountains is going home.”
John Muir
>
“In the interest of the public, the Government should have the right to
inspect and examine the workings of the great corporations engaged in
interstate business…The first requisite is knowledge, full and completeknowledge which may be public to the world….”
Theodore Roosevelt
•
These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism seem to have a
perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the
Mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.
John Muir (1912)
U.S. History Quotes
>43-Progressive Politics and the Election of
1912
>
“The American people have evidently made up their minds that our
natural resources must be conserved. That is good, but it settles only
half the question. For whose benefit shall they be conserved- for the
benefit of the many, or for the use and profit of the few?” Gifford
Pinchot
>
“I have no doubt that when you return you will find me very much
under suspicion…I have not the prestige which you had…and so I fear
that a large part of the public will feel as if I had fallen away from
your ideals…”
Letter written by William H. Taft
>
“I don’t like politics…I don’t like the limelight.”
>
“Washington was a dead town. Its leader was gone, and in his place
was a man whose fundamental desire was to keep out of trouble.”
Gifford Pinchot
William Howard Taft
U.S. History Quotes
>44-Wilson’s New Freedom
>
“I believe in democracy because it releases the energies of every human being.”
Woodrow Wilson
>
“There has been a change of government…Nowhere else in the world have noble men
and women exhibited in more striking forms the beauty and the energy of sympathy
and helpfulness and counsel in their efforts to rectify wrong, alleviate suffering,
and set the weak in the way of strength and hope.”
Woodrow Wilson’s 1 st
Inaugural
>
“Freedom today is something more than being let alone. Without the
watchful…resolute interference of the government, there can be no fair play
between individuals and such powerful institutions as the trust.”
Woodrow Wilson
>
“How long must women wait for liberty?” Picket Sign
>
“Have you a ‘new freedom’ for white Americans and a new slavery for your “AfroAmerican fellow citizens.’ God forbid!”
William Trotter, 1914
>
“We have made up our minds to square every process of our national life again with
the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our
hearts. Our work is a work of restoration.”
Woodrow Wilson’s 1st Inaugural
>
“There is no chance of progress and reform in an administration in which war plays
the principle part.”
Woodrow Wilson
>
“Control of the system of banking…which our new laws are to set up must be public,
not private, and must be vested in the Government itself, so that the banks may be
the instruments, not the masters, of business…”
Woodrow Wilson
U.S. History Quotes
>45-World War I
>
>
“The world must be made safe for democracy.”
Woodrow Wilson
“We are a composite and cosmopolitan people. We are of the blood of
all the nations that are at war.”
Wilson’s 2nd Inaugural
>
“We intend to begin unrestricted submarine warfare…We shall endeavor
in spite of this to keep the U.S. neutral. In the event of this not
succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance…”
Arthur
Zimmerman, 1917 German Foreign Secretary
>
“Hospital trains brought them filthy, hungry, exhausted to us. Many of
them had their faces blown away; pus flowed down their
chests…Hideous mutilation was the rule, not the exception.”
WW I
Nurse Katrina Herzer
>
“We desire neither conquest nor advantage. We wish nothing that can
be had only at the cost of another people. We always professed
unselfish purpose and we covet the opportunity to prove our professions
are sincere…”
Wilson’s 2nd Inaugural
U.S. History Quotes
>46-United States in WW I
>
“The present war must first be ended; but we owe it to candor and to a just
regard for the opinion of mankind to say that, so far as our participation in
guarantees of future peace is concerned, it makes a great deal of difference in
what way and upon what terms it is ended.”
President Wilson
>
“Work or Fight”
>
“It is not an army we must train for war, it is a nation.”
Wilson
>
“Whoever, when the United States is at war…shall willfully utter, print, write, or
publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of
government of the United States…shall be punished…” Congressional Act, 1918
>
“it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a
country fighting to make democracy safe in the world.”
Eugene V. Debs
>
“Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as
tolerance…Conformity would be the only virtue, and every man who refused to
conform would have to pay the penalty.”
President Woodrow Wilson
>
>
National War Labor Board
President Woodrow
“Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close ranks
shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that
are fighting for democracy.”
W.E.B. DuBois
U.S. History Quotes
>47-Fight for Peace
>
“That evil thing with the holy name.”
Henry Cabot Lodge
>
“This is not a time for tactics. It is a time to stand square. I can
stand defeat; I cannot stand retreat from conscientious duty.”
President Woodrow Wilson
>
“What is the result of this Treaty of Versailles?…We have
surrendered, once and for all, the great policy of no entangling
alliances upon which the strength of this republic has been based for
150 years.”
Senator William Borah
>
“A general association of nations must be formed under specific
covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political
independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”
Woodrow Wilson
>
“If we do not end wars, we are unfaithful to the loving hearts who
suffered in this war…The League of Nations is the only thing that can
prevent another dreadful catastrophe and fulfill our promises.”
Woodrow Wilson
U.S. History Quotes
>48-A Return to Normalcy
>
“The business of America is business.”
President Calvin Coolidge
>
“The blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American
institution…crawling into the sacred corners of American homes,…burning
up the foundations of American society.”
A. Mitchell Palmer
>
“In all my life I have never stole, never killed, never spilled blood….We
were tried during a time…when there was hysteria of resentment and
hate against the people of our principles, against the foreigner..I am
suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical”
Bartolomeo Vanzetti before his execution
>
“There is no right to strike against the public safety by anyone,
anywhere, any time.”
Boston Mayor Calvin Coolidge
>
“America’s present need is not heroics,…but normalcy”
Warren Harding
>
“I can speak officially only for our United States. Our hundred millions
frankly want less of armaments and none of war.”
President Warren
Harding at Washington Conferences
President
U.S. History Quotes
>49-Roaring 20’s
>
“From now on it will cost a man his job…to have the odor of beer, wine
or liquor on his breath, or to have any of these intoxicants on his
person or in his home. The Eighteenth Amendment is a part of the
fundamental laws of this country.”
Henry Ford, 1922
>
“If a minister believes and teaches evolution, he is a stinking skunk, a
hypocrite, and a liar.”
Evangelist Billy Sunday, 1925
>
“I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large
enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and
care for.”
Henry Ford
U.S. History Quotes
>50-20’s Culture
>
“I look forward to the day when transatlantic flying will be a regular
thing.”
Charles Lindbergh
>
“Some said goodbye cheerfully…others fearfully….others in their
eagerness said nothing. The daybreak found them gone. The wind said
North.”
Zora Neale Hurston
>
“I, too, am America.”
Langston Hughes
U.S. History Quotes
>51-Great Depression Begins
>
“We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before.”
President Herbert Hoover
>
“A chicken in every pot, and two cars in every garage.”
>
“Our first objective must be to provide security from poverty and want…We want to see
their savings protected. We want to see them in steady jobs. We want to see more and
more of them insured against death and accident, unemployment and old age. We want
them all secure.”
President Hoover
>
“Every time we find solutions outside of government, we have not only strengthened
character, but we have preserved our sense of real government.”
Herbert Hoover
>
“Wall Street Lays an Egg”
>
“Mellon pulled the whistle, Hoover rang the bell, Wall Street gave the signal, and the
country went to hell.” Popular slogan of the early Depression
>
“I couldn’t imagine such financial disaster touching my small world; it surely concerned only
the rich. But by the first week of November I too knew differently; along with millions of
others across the nation, I was without a job.”
Gordon Parks, 1929
>
“Here were all these people living in old, rusted out car bodies…There were people living in
shacks made of orange crates. One family with a whole lot of kids were living in a piano
box…People living in whatever they could junk together.”
Shantytown visitor outside
Oklahoma City
>
“The Negro was born in depression…It didn’t mean much to him, The Great Depression…The
best he could be is a janitor or a porter or shoeshine boy. It only became official when it
hit the white man.”
African American viewpoint
>
“I’ve lived in cities for many months, broke, without help, too timid to get in bread lines.
I’ve known many women to live like this until they simply faint in the street…shut up in the
terror of her own misery.”
Meridel Le Seur
>
“Ever since I was 12 years old there was one major goal in my life…one thing…and that was
to never be poor again.”
Depression Era Memories
>
“Brother, can you spare a dime?”
Hoover Campaign Slogan in 1928
Variety Magazine
Popular Song
U.S. History Quotes
>52-The New Deal
>
“The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and
try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
Franklin
Roosevelt
>
“Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it
wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government
itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war”
Roosevelt’s 1st Inaugural
>
This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.”
Roosevelt
>
“Last weekend was the worst dust storm we ever had…Many days this spring the air is just full of
dirt coming, literally, for hundreds of miles. It sifts into everything…” Ann Marie Low, North
Dakota
>
“I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis--broad Executive
power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we
were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
FDR’s 1st Inaugural
>
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
>
“I do think Roosevelt is the biggest-hearted man we ever had in the White House…It’s the first
time in my recollection that a President ever got up and said ‘I’m interested in and aim to do
something for the workin’ man.”
George Dobbin
>
“I can remember the first week of the CWA checks. It was a Friday. That night everybody had
gotten a check. The first check a lot of them had in three years…I never saw such a change in
attitude.” Hank Oettinger, Wisconsin
>
“The National Recovery Administration was created in response to an overwhelming demand…that
certain elements in the making of industrial policy…should no longer be left to the market place…but
should be placed in the hands of administrative bodies…”
Economist Gardiner Means
>
“The bank rescue of 1933 was probably the turning point of the Depression. When people were able
to survive the shock of having all the banks closed, and then see the banks open up, with their
money protected, there began to be confidence.”
Roosevelt Advisor
>
“We propose that children shall be borne in a land of opportunity, guaranteed a home, food,
clothes, and other things that make for living, including the right to an education.”
Louisiana
Senator Huey Long
>
“We have undertaken a new order of things, yet we progress to do it under the framework and in
the spirit and intent of the American Constitution.”
Franklin Roosevelt
>
“I can take him{FDR]. He’s a phony….He’s scared of me. I can outpromise him, and he knows it.
People will believe me and they won’t believe him…He’s living on an inherited income. I got nothin’, so
I don’t have to bother about that.”
Huey Long
President Franklin
Franklin Roosevelt’s 1 st Inaugurala
U.S. History Quotes
>53-The Second New Deal
>
“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.
>
It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in
hope--because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it,
proposes to paint it out.”
FDR’s 2nd Inaugural
>
“This is our hour! We’ve got to get everything we want- a works
program, social security, wages and hours, everything- now or never.”
Harry Hopkins, FDR Advisor
>
“Lots of us enjoyed our leisure at the movies. The experience of going
was like a candy we could never get enough of; the visit to the dark
theater was an escape from the drab realities of Depression living…”
Don Congdon
>
“The director of the Federal Arts Project was Edward Bruce…He
insisted there be no restrictions. You were a painter: Do your work.
You were a sculptor: Do your work.”
Artist Robert Gwathmey
U.S. History Quotes
>54-Beginnings of WW II
>
“This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every
American remain neutral in thought as well.”
Franklin Roosevelt,
1939
>
“My friends…there has come back from Germany peace with honor. I
believe it is peace in our time.”
Neville Chamberlain
>
“We have passed an awful milestone in our history…And do not suppose
that this is the end…we shall rise again and take our stand for freedom
as in the olden time.”
Winston Churchill
>
“Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They
chose dishonor. They will have war.”
Winston Churchill
>
“Hitler and Mussolini are madmen who respect force and force alone.”
Franklin Roosevelt, 1939
>
“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to
a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.” FDR Jan, 1941
U.S. History Quotes
>55-Holocaust
>
“We had to form a line and an SS man stood there with a little stick.
I was holding hands with my mother and…he sort of pushed me to one
side and my mother to the other side…and shortly thereafter, some
trucks arrived…and we were loaded onto the trucks.” Gerda Weissman
Klein, sole survivor of her family
>
“Thirty or forty of us were shot every day. A doctorusually prepared a
daily list of the weakest men. During the lunch break they were taken
to a nearby grave and shot. They were replaced the following morning
by new arrivals from the transport of the day…”
Rudolf Reder,
Belzac prisoner
>
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has
turned my life into one long night…”
Elie Wiesel
U.S. History Quotes
>56-United States Enters WW II
>
“I have said not once, but many times, that I have seen war and I
hate war…”
Franklin Roosevelt, September 1939
>
“I do not believe that we can become an arsenal for one belligerent
without becoming a target for another,”
Senator Arthur
Vandenberg, 1939
>
“Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the
Japanese launched an unprovoked and dastardly attack on American
soil.”
President Franklin Roosevelt
>
“We are now in this war. We are all in it- all the way.”
Roosevelt
>
“Just carve on my tombstone,’Here lies a black man killed fighting a
yellow man for the protection of a white man.’”
African American
after being drafted
>
“Organized power can be opposed only by organized power. Much as I
regret this, there is no other way.”
Albert Einstein
>
“You fought not only the enemy, you fought prejudice- and you won.”
President Harry Truman to the soldiers of the all Nisei 442 Regiment
Franklin
U.S. History Quotes
>57-War in Europe
>
“Now that we are, as you say, in the same boat, would it not be wise for us
to have another conference…and the sooner the better.”
Churchill to
Roosevelt
>
“Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning,
blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace…Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones
cannot bear it for long; only man endures.”
Lt. Weiner, German Officer
>
“The colossal German surrender has done more for American morale
here(Africa) than anything that could possibly have happened…As a result,
the hundreds of thousands of Americans in North Africa are now happy men.
Reporter Ernie Pyle
>
“People were yelling, screaming, dying, running on the beach, equipment was
flying everywhere, men were bleeding to death, crawling, lying everywhere,
firing coming from all directions…we dropped down behind anything that was
the size of a golf ball”
Omaha soldier Felix Branham
>
“Nuts”
>
“We started smelling a terrible odor and suddenly we were at the
concentration camp at Landsberg…we saw hundreds of burned and naked
bodies…for the first time I truly realized the evil of Hitler and why this war
had to be waged.”
Soldier Robert Johnson
>
“when they told me yesterday about Roosevelt’s, I felt like the moon, the
stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”
Harry Truman
>
“…the only way to take a beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at
first, but it’s the only way. If the men are pinned down on the beach, dug in
and out of action, they might as well not be there at all. They hold up the
waves behind them, and nothing is being gained.”
War Correspondent
Ernie Pyle
Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe
U.S. History Quotes
>58-War in the Pacific
>
“I shall return”
General Douglas MacArthur
>
“Tokyo bombed! Doolittle Do’od It”
>
“Hell was red furry spiders as big as your fist, giant lizards as long as
your leg, leeches falling from trees to suck blood, armies of white ants
with bites of fire…Hell was an enemy hidden in the dark deep shadows,
an enemy so fanatic that it used its own dead as booby traps.”
Guadalcanal soldier Ralph Martin
>
“The final decision of where and when to use the atomic bomb was up
to me. Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a
military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used.”
President Harry Truman
>
“Today the guns are silent. The skies no longer rain death- the seas
bear only commerce- men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The
entire world is quietly at peace.”
General Douglas MacArthur
>
“Beyond the zone of utter death in which nothing remained alive…Those
who were inside were either killed or wounded…And the few who
succeeded in making their way to safety generally died twenty or thirty
days later from the delayed effects of the deadly gamma rays.”
Hiroshima Observer, 1945
Newspaper Headlines April, 1942
U.S. History Quotes
>59-The Cold War
>
“We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other,
but only at the risk of his own life.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1953
>
“Almost a year ago, in company with 16 free nations of Europe, we launched the
greatest cooperative economic program in history. The purpose of that
unprecedented effort is to invigorate and strengthen democracy in Europe”
Harry Truman
>
“The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.
If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world -- and we
shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.”
President Harry Truman
>
“an iron curtain has descended across the continent…All these famous cities and
populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject in one form or
another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of
control from Moscow.”
Winston Churchill, 1946
>
“In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any U.S. policy toward
the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term but firm and vigilant containment of
Russian expansive tendencies.”
U.S. Diplomat to the USSR, George Kennan
>
“I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples
who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside
pressures…I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial
aid…”
President Truman
>
“When we woke up, the first thing we did was listen to see whether the noise of
aircraft engines could be heard…we were not alone, that the whole civilized world
took part in the fight for Berlin’s freedom.”
Berlin Resident, 1948
U.S. History Quotes
>60-Truman and the Cold War
>
“What the communists, the North Koreans, were doing was nothing new…Hitler and
Mussolini and the Japanese were doing the same things in the 1930’s…Nobody had stood up
to them. And that is what led to the Second World War.”
President Harry Truman
>
“we moved to Heartbreak Ridge…Our trenches in that sector were only about 20 meters in
front of theirs…We couldn’t move at all in the daytime without getting shot at…We lived in
amaze of bunkers and deep trenches…There were bodies strewn all over the place.
Hundreds of bodies frozen in the snow.” 1st Lt. Bev Scott
>
“The first time I was called a communist, I was 4 years old…I’ll never forget the look in
our neighbor’s eyes when I walked by. I thought it was hate. I was too young to realize it
was fear.” Tony Kahn, son of accused Communist Screenwriter
>
“I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before
our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused in my
opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea.”
Irving Kaufman, Judge in Rosenberg Case
>
“I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying
members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to
shape our foreign policy…”
Joseph McCarthy
>
“I think it is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the
Constitution. I think it is high time that we remembered the Constitution, as amended,
speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by
accusation.”
Senator Margaret Smith
>
“The Nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I do not want to see the Republican
Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny--fear, ignorance, bigotry
and smear…” Senator Margaret Smith
>
“We aren’t going to go back to where we were before the war. We’ve shed our blood and
proved our loyalty, and we’re going to fight for all that is rightfully due us. We won’t turn
back.” African American Jesse Hall
>
“I am asking for equality of opportunity for all human beings,…and if that ends up in my
failure to be re-elected, that failure will be in a good cause.” Harry Truman
>
“The Federal Government has a clear duty to see that Constitutional guarantees of
individual liberties and of equal protection under the laws are not denied or abridged
anywhere in our Union.”
Harry Truman, 1948
U.S. History Quotes
>61-Eisenhower and the 50’s
>
“I like Ike”
Campaign Slogan
>
“You have to take chances for peace, just as you must take chances in
war…If you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.”
Secretary
of States John Foster Dulles
>
“call the "falling domino" principle. You have a row of dominoes set up,
you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is
the certainty that it will go over very quickly.”
President Eisenhower
>
“If one of these aircraft were lost when we were engaged in apparently
sincere deliberations, it could…ruin my effectiveness.”
President
Dwight Eisenhower
>
“For one truth must rule all we think and all we do. No people can live
to itself alone. The unity of all who dwell in freedom is their only sure
defense. The economic need of all nations--in mutual dependence-makes isolation an impossibility…”
Eisenhower’s 2nd Inaugural
U.S. History Quotes
>62-50’s Culture
>
“The old theory that a woman’s place is in the home no longer exists.
Those days are gone forever.”
Female Steelworker
>
“He’d burst onto the stage from anywhere. And you wouldn’t be able to
hear anything but the roar of the audience…He’d be on the stage, he’d
be off the stage, he’d be jumping and yelling, screaming, whipping the
audience on…” H.B. Barnum on Little Richard
>
“There’s a lot more integration in the actual life of the U.S. than you’ll
find on T.V. But I notice that they always have integration in the
prison scenes on television.”
Nat Cole, black T.V. entertainer
>
“Poverty--grim, degrading, and ineluctable--is not remarkable in India.
For few the fate is otherwise. But in the United States the survival of
poverty is remarkable. We ignore it because we share with all societies
at all times the capacity for not seeing what we do not wish to see.”
Kenneth Galbraith
>
“The poor live in a culture of poverty,,,The poor get sick more than
anyone else in society…When they become sick, they are sicker longer
than any other group in the society. Because they are sick more often
and longer…they lose wages and work…and their prospect is to move to
an even lower level…toward even more suffering.”
Michael
Harrington, The Other America
>
“Suburban areas … inhabited by people in the same class, the same
income, the same age group, witnessing the same television
performances, eating the same tasteless… foods from the same
freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common
mold.”
Lewis Mumford
>
“The plunge from the strictly intellectual college life to the 24 hour a
day domestic one is a terrible shock.”
Recently Married College
Graduate
U.S. History Quotes
>63-Kennedy and the Cold War
>
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall
pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend,
oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
John F. Kennedy Inaugural
>
“The Kennedy Administration worried that the reliance on nuclear
weapons gave us no way to respond to large non-nuclear attacks without
committing suicide…We decided to broaden the range of options by
strengthening and modernizing the military’s ability to fight a nonnuclear war.”
Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara
>
“We are eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked.”
Secretary of State Dean Rusk
>
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall
pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend,
oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of
liberty.”
JFK Inaugural
>
“To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive
military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated.”
President Kennedy, Oct, 1962
U.S. History Quotes
>64-The New Frontier
>
“We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier.”
John F. Kennedy
>
“That night, image replaced the printed word as the natural language
of politics.”
Journalist Russell Baker
>
“Ask not what your country can do for you- ask what you can do for
your country.”
John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Speech
>
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal,
before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning
him safely to earth.”
John F. Kennedy
>
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this
decade and do the other things, not only because they are easy, but
because they are hard…”
John F. Kennedy
U.S. History Quotes
>65-Great Society
>
“This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on
poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join me
in that effort.”
Lyndon Johnson, State of Union, 1964
>
“Our chief weapon in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools,
and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better
job opportunities to help more Americans…”
LBJ, State of Union,
1964
>
“Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it
and, above all, to prevent it.”
LBJ
>
“We must provide hospital insurance for our older citizens financed by
every worker and his employer under Social Security…”
LBJ
>
“Let me make one principle of this administration abundantly clear: All
of these increased opportunities….must be open to Americans of every
color…we must abolish not some, but all racial discrimination.”
LBJ
U.S. History Quotes
>66-Civil Rights Movement
>
“I don’t believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or decisions.”
President Dwight Eisenhower
>
“Within minutes a world that had been holding its breath learned that nine
pupils, protected by the might of the U.S. military, had finally entered the
‘never-never land’.”
Daisy Bates, Arkansas NAACP, 1957
>
“Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it
and win it in every generation.”
Coretta Scott King
>
“To separate African-American children from others of similar age and
qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority
as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds
ina way unlikely ever to be undone…We conclude that in the field of public
education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place.”
Chief Justice
Earl Warren
>
“It certainly was time for someone to stand up, ..So I refused to move.”
Rosa Parks
>
“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the
iron feet of oppression…I want it to be known- that we’re going to work with
grim and bold determination- to gain justice on buses in this city. And we are
not wrong…If we are wrong- the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If
we are wrong- God Almighty is wrong…If we are wrong- justice is a lie.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
>
“If you will protest courageously and yet with dignity,…historians will have to
pause and say, ‘There lived a great people- a black people- who injected a
new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’”
Martin Luther King
Jr.
>
“We will not hate you, but we cannot…obey your unjust laws. We will soon
wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And in winning our freedom, we will
so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
U.S. History Quotes
>67-Civil Rights Movement 2
>
“We will continue our journey one way or another.,..We are prepared
to die.”
Jim Zwerg, Freedom Rider
>
“if we let them stop us with violence, the movement is dead!… Your
troops have been badly battered. Let us pick up the baton and run with
it.” Diana Nash, SNCC leader
>
“Violence is a fearful thing,…I remember when I had to take a stand,
where the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth,…because the fear was
in me so strong.”
Avon Rollings, SNCC
>
“This (Birmingham) is the most segregated city in America,… We have
to stick together if we ever want to change its ways.”
Martin
Luther King Jr.
>
“when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son asking,
“Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”… then you
will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”
Martin Luther King
Jr., Birmingham Jail Letter
>
“I say, Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow, Segregation forever!”
George Wallace
>
“Are we to say to the world- and much more importantly, to each
other- that this is the land of the free, except for the Negroes?”
John F. Kennedy
U.S. History Quotes
>68-Civil Rights Crisis
>
“You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.”
Medgar Evers
>
“If you think we are here to tell you to love the white man, you have
come to the wrong place.”
Malcolm X
>
“I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a
solution to the American black man’s problem…If it must take violence
to get the black man his human rights in this country, I’m for
violence.”
Malcolm X
>
“Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend
himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal and
lawful to own a shotgun or rifle. We believe in obeying the laws…”
Malcolm X, 1964
>
“This is the 27th time I have been arrested- and I ain’t going to jail no
more!…We been saying freedom for six years- and we ain’t got nothin’.
What we’re gonna start saying now is Black Power.”
Stokely
Carmichael
>
“I have prayed…with fellow Muslims whose eyes were the bluest of
blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the
whitest of white.”
Malcolm X, 1964
>
“if you and I don’t use the ballot, we’re going to be forced to use the
bullet. So let us try the ballot.”
Malcolm X, 1964
>
“I may not get ther with you, but I want you to know tonight that we
as a people will get to the Promised Land…And I’m happy tonight. I’m
not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of
the Lord.”
Martin Luther King Jr. , 1968
U.S. History Quotes
>69-Vietnam War Era
>
“If I …let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then…my nation
would be seen as an appeaser, and we would find it impossible to
accomplish anything…anywhere on the entire globe.”
Lyndon Johnson
>
“all Vietnam is not worth the life of a single American boy.”
Senator Ernest Gruening, Alaska
>
“You look ahead a few paces and wonder what your legs will resemble if
there is more to thee earth in that spot…Will the pain be unbearable?
Will you scream and fall silent? Will you be afraid to look at your own
body,…”
Tim O’Brien, 22 years old, 1968
>
“not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from
home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
Lyndon Johnson, 1964
>
“You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at
those odds, you will lose and I will win.”
Communist leader Ho Chi
Minh
>
“We had to destroy the town in order to save it.”
town of Ben Tre, 1968
>
“We were taking young black men who had been crippled by our society
and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in
Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and
East Harlem.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“Americans and Asians are dying for a world where people may choose
its own path to change. Why must we take this painful road?…Only in
such a world will our own freedom be secure…”
President Johnson,
1965
>
Soldier outside
U.S. History Quotes
>70-Vietnam War Era 2
>
“Vietnam is still with us…We paid an exorbitant price for the decisions that were
made.”
Henry Kissinger
>
“I’m bitter…It’s people like us who give up their sons for the country…The college
types…they go to Washington and tell the government what to do…But their sons,
they don’t end up in the swamps over there, in Vietnam. No, They’re deferred,
because they’re in school.”
Firefighter
>
“more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a
stalemate.”
News Anchor Walter Cronkite
>
“If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, then it’s over, I’ve lost Mr. Average Citizen.”
Lyndon Johnson
>
“Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party
for another term of President.”
Lyndon Johnson
>
“That…war killed the lady I really loved- the Great Society.”
>
“Peace with honor”
>
“We huddled them up…I poured about four clips into the group…The mothers were
hugging their children…Well, we kept right on firing.”
Soldier at My Lai
Massacre, 1968
>
“is our offspring and if it falls victim to any of the perils that threaten its
existence…then the U.S….will be held responsible; and our prestige in Asia will
sink…”
John F. Kennedy, 1956
>
“The year ended with the enemy increasingly resorting to desperation tactics; and
he has experienced only failure in these events.”
General William Westmoreland,
1967
>
“I am taking the first step to de-escalate the conflict…unilaterally and at once…I
have ordered our aircraft…to make no attacks on North Vietnam…I call upon
President Ho Chi Minh to respond positively…to this new step toward peace.”
President Johnson, March 1968
>
“I won’t make it hard for the North Vietnamese…, but I will not be the first
President of the U.S. to lose a war.”
President Richard Nixon
Lyndon Johnson
Richard Nixon
U.S. History Quotes
>71-60’s Social Change
>
“The times they are a-changin”
Bob Dylan
>
“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of
American women…Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone…Is
this all?”
Betty Freidan, The Feminine Mystique
>
“I am now a feminist…I am infused with pride-in my sisters, in myself,
in my womanhood.”
Sophy Burnham
>
“It was like paradise there. Everybody was in love with life and in love
with their fellow human beings…You could walk down any street in
Haight-Ashbury where I was living, and someone would smile at you and
just go, Hey it’s beautiful, isn’t it?…It was a special time.”
Alex
Forman
>
“Tune in, turn on, drop out.”
>
“I had carried…the weight of guilt and apology for interests and
ambitions that should have been a source of pride. When that weight
was lifted, I felt almost literally lighter,certainly more energetic, more
concentrated.”
Timothy Leary
U.S. History Quotes
>72-Nixon Presidency
>
“I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically without a
President.”
Richard Nixon
>
“What did the President know and when did he know it?” Senator
Howard Baker
>
“It will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong,
healthy U.S., Europe, Soviet Union, China, and Japan-each balancing
the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance.”
President Richard Nixon, 1971
U.S. History Quotes
>73-1970’s
>
“Our long national nightmare is over”
Gerald Ford
>
“I will never tell a lie to the American people.”
>
“The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not
act quickly. It is a problem…likely to get progressively worse through
the rest of this century…”
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter
U.S. History Quotes
>74-The 1980’s
>
“in the present crisis, government is not the solution to the problem;
government is the problem.”
Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address,
1981
>
“A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when
you lose yours. A recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”
Ronald
Reagan
>
“I regret to say that we’re in the worst economic mess since the Great
Depression…It’s time to recognize that we’ve come to a turning
point…Together, we must chart a new course.”
Ronald Reagan,
Televised Speech, 1981
>
“Read my lips, no new taxes”
>
“Just Say No!”
>
“Ronald Reagan…had the vision and flexibility lacking in many Cold
warriors, to recognize that Gorbachev was a new man in a new age
offering new opportunities for peace.”
Colin Powell
>
“We went halfway around the world to do what is moral and just and
right…We’re coming home now proud, confident, heads held high…We
are Americans.”
George Bush
>
“The events of the year just ended, the revolution of ’89, have been a
chain reaction, changes so striking that it marks the beginning of a new
era in the world’s affairs.”
President George Bush, 1990
>
“The Cold War is now behind us. Let us not wrangle over who won it. It
is the common interest of our two countries and nations not to fight
this trend toward cooperation, but rather to promote it.”
Mikhail
Gorbachev, 1990
George Bush
Nancy Reagan
U.S. History Quotes
>75-Toward a New Century
>
We are at a period of historic change- the way we work; the way we
live; the way we relate to each other; the way we relate to others
beyond our borders.”
Bill Clinton
>
“There are literally millions of Americans who don’t have access to the
same quality or quantity of care as millions of others…All too often the
decisions about…care…are made on factors other than what is best for
the patient.”
Hillary Clinton