American History Quotes

1. "Language itself is so value-laden as to render value-neutrality almost impossible. Growing up in England I was introduced to the American Revolution by a 'footnote' to colonial history about the 'revolt' of the American colonies. Word choice and the organization of material gave the game away."
Author: Arthur F. Holmes

2. "As an American people, what is greatest about our history are the many times we have led this world away from hate, towards hope."
Author: Benjamin Todd Jealous

3. "Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage."
Author: Carl Bernstein

4. "By the seventh year of the Bush-Cheney presidency, Bush had attached signing statements to about 150 bills enacted since he took office, challenging the constitutionality of well over 1,100 separate sections in the legislation. By contrast, all previous presidents in American history combined had used signing statements to challenge the constitutionality of about 600 sections of bills, according to historical data compiled by Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who was one of the first to study signing statements."
Author: Charlie Savage

5. "This anniversary serves to help remind the American people that, in the wake of one of the greatest political scandals and misuse of power in our history as a nation, scandal produced important reforms that served this nation well for two decades."
Author: Elliot Richardson

6. "I hate American History after 1850."
Author: Emma Iadanza

7. "Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering."
Author: Eric Metaxas

8. "Tony Kaye is great with that kind of stuff. Up until American History X, he had only done commercials."
Author: Ethan Suplee

9. "He presented himself as the friend to Main Street America, and yet that aw-shucks persona ended up packaging policies and programs that were at times deeply injurious to the very people he swore to serve. After all, Reaganomics set in motion one of the largest wealth redistributions in American history, away from the poor and toward the rich."
Author: Eugene Jarecki

10. "Americans, though apparently impressed by ghastly sentimentality and outrageous hypocrisy, are by nature much more politically cynical than Canadians. In their longer history they have had much more to be cynical about. They demand a vulgar show, enjoy it, guffaw, and forget it the next morning. When a new U.S. President takes office all bets are off and his campaign platform is dismantled and stored away."
Author: Gordon Donaldson

11. "Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama's election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening."
Author: Hari Kunzru

12. "This is the worst President ever. He George W. Bush is the worst President in all of American history."
Author: Helen Thomas

13. "The first phase of American political history was characterized by the conflict between the Federalists and the Republicans, and it resulted in the complete triumph of the latter."
Author: Herbert Croly

14. "The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. There is no system of control with more openings, apertures, leeways, flexibilities, rewards for the chosen, winning tickets in lotteries. There is none that disperses its controls more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media--none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty."
Author: Howard Zinn

15. "For over a century, an evolving microcosm of Anthropology's turbulent history has hidden behind the staid façade of the American Museum of Natural History. From an insider's perspective, the well-known ethnologist Stan Freed engagingly introduces us to an amazing cast of explorers, eccentrics, idealists, pranksters and forbidding intellectual - an unlikely mix that played a key role in establishing the science of Anthropology as we know it today."
Author: Ian Tattersall

16. "My ideal man is Benjamin Franklin—the figure in American history most worthy of emulation ... Franklin is my ideal of a whole man. ... Where are the life-size—or even pint-size—Benjamin Franklins of today?"
Author: Isidor Isaac Rabi

17. "Those who have heard me speak from time to time know that quite often I cite the observation of that great American author, Mark Twain, who said, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes."
Author: J. D. Hayworth

18. "I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime."
Author: James Ellroy

19. "Through educational programming, Jewish American History Month will help raise the awareness of a people, their history and contributions. It will help combat anti-Semitism, a phenomenon that is on the rise and that unfortunately still exists in our Nation."
Author: Jan Schakowsky

20. "Still, it strikes me that, taken together, they do make an argument, and it is this: the rise of American democracy is bound up with the history of reading and writing, which is one of the reasons the study of American history is inseparable from the study of American literature. In the early United States, literacy rates rose and the price of books and magazines and newspapers fell during the same decades that suffrage was being extended. With everything from constitutions and ballots to almanacs and novels, American wrote and read their way into a political culture inked and stamped and pressed in print."
Author: Jill Lepore

21. "Whether one believes that the faith he spawned is the world's only true religion or a preposterous fable, Joseph emerges from the fog of time as one of the most remarkable figures ever to have breathed American air. "Whatever his lapses," Harold Bloom argues in The American Religion, "Smith was an authentic religious genius, unique in our national history.... In proportion to his importance and his complexity, he remains the least-studied personage, of an undiminished vitality, in our entire national sage."
Author: Jon Krakauer

22. "There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn't exist."
Author: Jonah Goldberg

23. "I'm the treasurer of the state of Ohio, where, when the United States credit rating was downgraded for the first time in American history, and 14 government funds around the country were downgraded, we earned the highest rating we could earn on our $4 billion investment fund."
Author: Josh Mandel

24. "Hi, already doused, was nonchalant. "Did the bad Indian throw you in the water, boy?" Taking a knee, he ruffled Coop's ears. "Been there."Hi was referring to Ben's claim of ties to the Sewee, a North American clan folded into the Catawba tribe centuries ago. He'd even named his boat Sewee."I feel your pain," Hi continued. "Thanksgiving was a huge mistake."Coop licked Hi's face."Not nice," I joked. "You'll sour Jewish-Sewee relations.""It's true, I take it back," Hi said. "Our peoples have a rich history of mutual respect. Long live the alliance!"
Author: Kathy Reichs

25. "If you stop and think about our history, one of the reasons we had an American century and there is an American dream was because at key points in our history we made very bold decisions about making sure that there was very broad, universal access to quality education."
Author: Ken Mehlman

26. "As Africans Americans we often think about the tragic stories associated with our lineage, but there are a lot of triumphs. Traveling helps you learn about other aspects of our history, like the story of Christ the Redeemer. It's empowering and inspiring."
Author: Laz Alonso

27. "In my opinion, assassination theories will continue to revolve around these assassinations as they have around several other significant assassinations in American history. The assassination of President Lincoln comes to mind."
Author: Louis Stokes

28. "Mention the name George W. Bush in mixed company, and you're likely to spark a lot of debate and emotion - hot and cold, good and bad. Not a lot of neutral reaction. He was elected in the most controversial contest in American electoral history and governed during one of the most tumultuous decades."
Author: Mark McKinnon

29. "In 2008, America elected a man with no "hands-on experience" of anything who promptly cocooned himself within a circle of advisors with less experience of business, of the private sector, of doing than any previous administration in American history. You want "change," so you vote for a bunch of guys who've never done nuthin' but sit around talking?"
Author: Mark Steyn

30. "Some other facts I picked up:Welsh is an actual, currently used language and our next-door neighbours Angela and Gaenor spoke it. It sounds like Wizard.Baked beans are very popular in England. For breakfast. On toast. On baked potatoes. They can't get enough."American History" is not a subject everywhere.England and Britain and the United Kingdom are not the same thing. England is the country. Britain is the island containing England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom is the formal designation of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as a political entity. If you mess this up, you will be corrected. Repeatedly."
Author: Maureen Johnson

31. "American movies, English books - remember how they all end?" Gamini asked that night. "The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit."
Author: Michael Ondaatje

32. "In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing."
Author: Nigel Cole

33. "On various occasions, especially in trying to think of western American history in the context of the worldwide history of colonialism, it has struck me that much of the mental behavior that we sometimes denounce as ethnocentrism and cultural insensitivity actually derives less from our indifference or hostility than from our clumsiness and awkwardness when we leave the comfort of the English language behind... [V]enturing outside the bounds of the English language exercises and stretches our minds in ways that are essential for getting as close as we can to the act of seeing the world from what would otherwise remain unfamiliar and alien perspectives."
Author: Patricia Nelson Limerick

34. "When President Obama entered the White House, the economy was in a free-fall. The auto industry: on its back. The banks: frozen up. More than three million Americans had already lost their jobs. And America's bravest, our men and women in uniform, were fighting what would soon be the longest wars in our history."
Author: Rahm Emanuel

35. "At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest."
Author: Ralph Ellison

36. "My reading of American religious history is that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power. Once you identify the faith with a particular candidate or party or with the quest for political influence, ultimately it is the faith that suffers. Compromise may work in politics. It's less appropriate to the realm of faith and belief."
Author: Randall Balmer

37. "Joseph Smith, its enterprisingly mendacious inventor, went to the lengths of composing a complete new holy book, the Book of Mormon, inventing from scratch a whole new bogus American history, written in bogus seventeenth-century English."
Author: Richard Dawkins

38. "Zorro also is part of the bandido tradition, most closely associated with the possibly mythical Joaquin Murrieta and the historical Tiburcio Vasquez. As well as these local California legendary figures, Zorro is an American version of Robin Hood and similar heroes whose stories blend fiction and history, thus moving Zorro into the timeless realm of legend. The original story takes place in the Romantic era, but, more important, Zorro as Diego adds an element of poetry and sensuality, and as Zorro the element of sexuality, to the traditional Western hero. Not all Western heroes are, as D. H. Lawrence said of Cooper's Deerslayer, "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer," but in the Western genre the hero and villain more often than not share these characteristics. What distinguishes Zorro is a gallantry, a code of ethics, a romantic sensibility, and most significant, a command of language and a keen intelligence and wit."
Author: Robert E. Morsberger

39. "The social and economic impact of innovative American researchers, companies, and workers over the course of U.S. history have been enormous."
Author: Robert Hormats

40. "MOMA's values were blown through the American education system, from high school upwards-and downwards, too, greatly raising the status of "creativity" and "self-expression" in kindergarten. By the 1970s, the historical study of modern art had expanded to the point where students were scratching for unexploited thesis subjects. By the mid-eighties, twenty-one-year-old art-history majors would be writing papers on the twenty-six-year-old graffitists."
Author: Robert Hughes

41. "More Americans are working today than at any time in history."
Author: Roger Wicker

42. "The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history."
Author: Russell Lynes

43. "Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or Japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans -- or even Romans, the most "modern" among people of antiquity -- they all placed the Golden Age, the Age of Truth, the rule of Kronos or of Ra or of any other gods on earth -- the glorious beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given -- far behind them in the past."
Author: Savitri Devi

44. "We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories."
Author: Steven C. Rockefeller

45. "Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional closure' which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force. He is not seeking, absurdly, to deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, meanings, identities, intentions, historical continuities; he is seeking rather to see such things as the effects of a wider and deeper history of language, of the unconscious, of social institutions and practices."
Author: Terry Eagleton

46. "Baseball and American football and hockey are all ahead because they have a history. The MLS is kind of new. So hopefully, in time, and with players coming and trying to develop the game, and the U.S. team also doing well - at the last World Cup, they finished above England and created some buzz."
Author: Thierry Henry

47. "After the 11 September attack," March editorializes one morning, "amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame 'the CIA' or 'a secret rogue operation.' But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line--who knows, maybe even the CIA's scared of them."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

48. "I have scary eyes. I look like the guy in 'American History X,' yes. I remember coming home from school and asking my mum if I could get an eye transplant, and of course she declined."
Author: Tim Ferriss

49. "It was OK for the media to pursue Former President Clinton year after year for lying about a private, consensual sexual affair, but we have five justices who committed one of the biggest crimes in American History, and it ceased to be a big story."
Author: Vincent Bugliosi

50. "Today's Europeans and Americans who reached the age of awareness after midcentury when the communications revolution lead to expectations of instantanaiy are exasperated by the slow toils of history. They assume that the thunderclap of cause will be swiftly followed by the lightening bolt of effect."
Author: William R. Manchester

American History Quotes Pictures