Bruce Catton Quotes

#1. The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to that of the United States.

Bruce Catton

#2. You were apt to go from one extreme to the other, in a truly pious environment; which is why ministers' sons in that day were more less expected to become loose livers when they grew up.

Bruce Catton

#3. The 1860 election became a referendum on the southern way of life.

Bruce Catton

#4. Like most Rebel soldiers, Sam Watkins owned no slaves.

Bruce Catton

#5. To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it - this is a hard lesson.

Bruce Catton

#6. And there is the headlight, shining far down the track, glinting off the steel rails that, like all parallel lines, will meet in infinity, which is after all where this train is going.

Bruce Catton

#7. What began as a bitter dispute over Union and States' Rights, ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in America. At Gettysburg in 1863, Abraham Lincoln said perhaps more than he knew. The war was about a new birth of freedom.

Bruce Catton

#8. We lived in Indian summer and mistook it for spring.

Bruce Catton

#9. Abraham Lincoln was not all brooding and melancholy and patient understanding. There was a hard core in him, and plenty of toughness. He could recognize a revolutionary situation when he saw one, and he could act fast and ruthlessly to meet it.

Bruce Catton

#10. Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.

Bruce Catton

#11. History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

Bruce Catton

#12. I think I was always subconsciously driven by an attempt to restate that faith and to show where it was properly grounded, how it grew out of what a great many young men on both sides felt and believed and were brave enough to do.

Bruce Catton

#13. Early youth is a baffling time.

Bruce Catton

#14. The enduring realization that when a great challenge comes, the most ordinary people can show that they value something more than they value their own lives. When the last of the veterans had gone, and the sorrows and bitterness which the war created had at last worn away, this memory remained.

Bruce Catton

#15. Shiloh had as many casualties as Waterloo, and yet there were another 20 Waterloos to come.

Bruce Catton

#16. A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.

Bruce Catton

#17. Men see things late, and it may be that at times an evil fate drives them on.

Bruce Catton

#18. There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect.

Bruce Catton

#19. Say this for big league baseball - it is beyond any question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.

Bruce Catton

#20. Progress is the sum of small victories won by individual human beings.

Bruce Catton

#21. Soldiers who had been in the army long enough to know what a bloody swindle war really is would begin to feel that army life was really kind of fun, as long as [General Philip] Sheridan was up front.

Bruce Catton

#22. The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina on the Florida coast. More than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2 percent of the population, died in it.

Bruce Catton

#23. Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.

Bruce Catton

#24. Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.

Bruce Catton

#25. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.

Bruce Catton

#26. Yet there is a dignity in the human spirit which can become most clearly visible in the moment of defeat and disaster.

Bruce Catton

#27. The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you.

Bruce Catton

#28. Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other and killed each other in great numbers - if only to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive of how that was possible.

Bruce Catton