Quotes About American History

#1. The Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have taken the biggest lurch to the left in policy in American history. There've been no - no Congress, no administration that has run this far to the left in such a small period of time. And there is a reaction to that.

Haley Barbour

#2. There were no stars, only the darkness and an arctic chill that had intensified since the first thin, blood-red stripes of sunrise shimmered on the ocean's horizon.

P.J. Parker

#3. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?

Philip Dray

#4. We don't know anything about Scottish history. All we know is that an American guy painted his face blue and somehow they won.

Greg Proops

#5. The largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983.

Michael Greger

#6. As president, I would promote a Fair and Flat Tax plan, known as the 'EZ Tax.' My tax plan would be the largest tax cut in American history, reforming individual, business, and worker taxes.

Rand Paul

#7. We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.

Tom Wolfe

#8. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#9. The United States was born in revolution and nurtured by struggle. Throughout our history, the American people have befriended and supported all those who seek independence and a better way of life.

Robert Kennedy

#10. My fellow citizens, our nation is poised for greatness. We must do what we know is right, and do it with all our might. Let history say of us: "These were golden years - when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, and America reached for her best."

Ronald Reagan

#11. We believe in equality for all, and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are an inclusive, rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.

Barbara Jordan

#12. American history is parking lots.

William Least Heat-Moon

#13. ...American history can be told and retold, claimed and reclaimed, even by people who don't look like George Washington and Betsy Ross.

Jeremy McCarter

#14. I wanted to be what my high-school civics and history teacher thought of as a good American. That automatically involved taking an interest in government.

Olivia De Havilland

#15. New York State is giant and has some of the most beautiful landscape on the Eastern seaboard. There is so much history in New York State, from the Erie Canal to the Catskills, the birth of American stand-up comedy.

Adam Savage

#16. The whole scene made Dan think of American history tests, which were almost as scary as exploding museums.

Rick Riordan

#17. Because the American people champion liberty, more people in the world live free today than at any time in history. Yet, there is more to be done and it is America who will lead the way.

Dick Armey

#18. There can be no argument about the Lone Star State's significant contributions to American history, and we must remember the actions and the sacrifices of those who made Texas independence a reality.

Michael McCaul

#19. Hitler learned his eugenics from the infamous "Baur-Fischer-Lenz" book that documented American and British eugenics.

A.E. Samaan

#20. We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories.

Steven C. Rockefeller

#21. The true history of Vietnamese civilian suffering does not fit comfortably into America's preferred postwar narrative - the tale of a conflict nobly fought by responsible commanders and good American boys, who should not be tainted by the occasional mistakes of a few 'bad apples' in their midst.

Nick Turse

#22. George W. Bush is the worst President
in all of American history.

Helen Thomas

#23. During the settling of the American colonies, it was said that the Spaniards would first build a church, the Dutch would first build a fort and the English a tavern. Welcome to Charleston, an English colony founded in 1670.

Mark R. Jones

#24. 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.

Mark McKinnon

#25. There is no 20-year period in American history when stocks lost money.

P. J. O'Rourke

#26. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.

Abraham Lincoln

#27. 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.

Herbert Croly

#28. With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt on to someone else.

Andrew Roberts

#29. We discussed the history of postwar Japan and how Japan had missed an opportunity to build a more functional democracy because of the focus on fighting communism driven in large part by the American occupation.

Joichi Ito

#30. The Trail of Tears has a great deal of meaning for every person of American Indian ancestry, whether they are Cherokee or not. For me, it has always stood for what is best and worst about the history of the United States.

Joseph Bruchac

#31. American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation.

Camille Paglia

#32. The doctrine of preemption has a long and distinguished history in the history of American foreign policy.

John Lewis Gaddis

#33. The history of American wars is littered with propaganda, falsehoods, a compliant media, the manipulation of patriotic sentiment - everything we've seen recently, we've seen before. Time and again.

Murray Polner

#34. We should not blur the lines between legal and illegal immigrants. Millions of people around the world have gone through the process to come here legally and they followed the rules that required them to pay a fee, learn English, and learn about American history and government.

Ken Calvert

#35. For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end ... such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.

C. Wright Mills

#36. 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.

Vincent Bugliosi

#37. This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.

Nick Joaquin

#38. We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.

Yvette Clarke

#39. An important document of the paper of record at a crucial, make-or-break juncture in its long, glorious history, and a love letter to the dying art form that is the great American newspaper.

Nathan Rabin

#40. As an immigrant, I appreciate, far more than the average American, the liberties we have in this country. Silence is a big enemy of morality. I don't want our blunders in history to get repeated.

Gloria Estefan

#41. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.

Brad Jensen

#42. If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s.

Ruth Reichl

#43. I'm very interested in the early American history, the time when the country came together.

Ben Stiller

#44. Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement.

Joy DeGruy

#45. Wilmington, Del. (AP) June 14, 1966 - A fire that destroyed the city's oldest Negro church has led to the discovery of a wild slave narrative that highlights a little-known era of American history. The First United

James McBride

#46. Do you understand the meaning of the soil beneath your feet?

P.J. Parker

#47. Rainbow Cloud strode forward like a hunting cat with the same strength of height and broad shoulders, the same rolling gait as First Light's father. They were indeed the same man, split in two at birth, so the family might be rewarded by twice the skill in hunting each brother possessed.

P.J. Parker

#48. My favorite forgotten President in American history is James Buchanan, who in defending really robust and sharp-elbowed debates said, "I like the noise of democracy. I like the sound of people in the streets making noise."

Jeff Sharlet

#49. Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called 'progressives' should be thanking him for it - even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.

John Podhoretz

#50. Did the color of his skin matter? No, Lina decided, wouldn't his racial ambiguity be a strength? Wasn't this a history from which they had all emerged, every American, black and white and every shade in between?

Tara Conklin

#51. Like an unfinished symphony, her story played on my mind for most of my life. It would rock to the tune of the passage of time, an adagio of high notes, low notes an illusive movements. Then when I least expected it, I happened upon the missing notes in the life of Charlotte Howe Taylor.

Sally Armstrong

#52. I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.

Rashid Johnson

#53. Politicians against gay marriage now, are the future villains of our American History books.

Natalie Maines

#54. If Martin Luther King were here he'd be very surprised at some of the sugar-coated versions of American history presented today.

Kwasi Kwarteng

#55. 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.

Jan Schakowsky

#56. I hated the lost colony; in second grade, we were doing American History, and they said, We don't know what happened to them. That drove me nuts. That lost colony drove me crazy.

Sarah Vowell

#57. And the other issue is Gore, $4.6 trillion - the single largest expansion of government in American history, from universal preschool, now, to prescriptions to health care - it is Socialism 101.

Sean Hannity

#58. The history of American patriotism is figuring out ways that we can work together to move forward and knit together the common government.

Taylor Branch

#59. The hiring of Phil Messina, the production designer, was a big decision. He's so gifted, and his ideas were always so smart and rooted in American history and architecture. Nothing feels like it's not us, or couldn't be us, and I think that's very important.

Nina Jacobson

#60. The history of American agriculture suggests that you can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front.

Atul Gawande

#61. He was a man's man, despite his vocation; after all, he studied American history. A litany of red-blooded patriots, fighting savages and redcoats alike, taming the wilderness, proving their worth with bulging sinews and roaring guns.

Jordan L. Hawk

#62. Washington's address is virtually unknown today and has not been seen in most American history textbooks in nearly four decades. Perhaps it is because of all the religious warnings Washington made in his 'Farewell Address.'

David Barton

#63. From the ashes of the Triangle Company fire began to rise one of the most dramatic and far-reaching [changes] in American history-one that would...eventually redefine forever the role the government played in the lives of ordinary people.

Ric Burns

#64. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#65. [The Drafters of the Constitution] were intent on avoiding more than 100 years of religious intolerance and persecution in American colonial history and an even longer heritage of church-state problems in Europe.

John M Swomley

#66. In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#67. The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.

Charles E. Rosenberg

#68. I understood ... that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

#69. Few dramas in American political history remain more riveting than that of Nixon's exit and Mr. Ford's reaction, at first halting and then decisive, to the looming possibility of a former president on criminal trial for months on end.

Scott Shane

#70. His [Gen. Douglas MacArthurs] twenty-two medals-thirteen of them for heroism-probably exceeded those of any other figure in American history. He seemed to seek death on battlefields.

William Manchester

#71. I went to my first dinosaur hall with my father and twin brother. We went to the American Museum of Natural History, and I was blown away by the dinosaurs.

David H. Koch

#72. The other Clans will soon arrive. The greatest times of our family are before us. And so are the darkest.

P.J. Parker

#73. When you go back and look at American history, it's not terribly different from Canadian history. If you weren't self-reliant on the prairie, you wouldn't survive.

Alan Greenspan

#74. The countless number of influential figures in American history who are of Caribbean heritage indicates the need to set aside a designated time to celebrate their contribution to our country.

Eliot Engel

#75. Without question, the Red Ryder BB gun is the most important gun in the history of American weaponry.

Ted Nugent

#76. It's the [George Bush] president's fiscal policies that have driven up the biggest deficits in American history. He's added more debt to the debt of the United States in four years than all the way from George Washington to Ronald Reagan put together.

John F. Kerry

#77. Although most Americans believed in Manifest Destiny, few could agree on exactly which lands the United States was supposed to govern.

Charles W. Carey Jr.

#78. The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It'll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn't been reusable.

Elon Musk

#79. It is one of history's great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans.

Andrew Sullivan

#80. Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.

Drew Gilpin Faust

#81. The mainstreaming of African American history was a byproduct of the long black freedom struggle, the early black history movement, and the black student movement of the Black Power era.

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie

#82. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#83. Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way.

B.W. Powe

#84. For the first time in history, the typical American now spends more years single than married. What

Aziz Ansari

#85. Whether you attribute it to some mysterious triple package or to your own Horatio Alger story, to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America - which means that at some level you've made peace with its rather ugly past.

Vijay Iyer

#86. He found his irritation that the American memory could be short.

James Carl Nelson

#87. 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.

Eric Metaxas

#88. Well, I'm a history buff, anyway. I love learning about different periods, especially in American history. I'm a fan.

William Sadler

#89. We are going to have the candidate of food stamps, the finest food-stamp president in the American history, in Barack Obama, and we are going to have a candidate of paychecks.

Newt Gingrich

#90. MEN WALK ON THE MOON. To me, this speaks of a time when America wasn't just about the almighty buck. The Russians had put up Sputnik, and the U.S. would not be outdone. I admire that about the American spirit. There's only one spot in history for the first ever of anything.

Nathan Fillion

#91. The Russians would lose 305,000 troops in the last 42 miles approaching Berlin
about the number of American army soldiers who died in all of World War II. Of the 125,000 of Berlin's civilians who died in the Russian attack, 6,400 were suicides;

Andrei Cherny

#92. Throughout American history many of our social gains and much of our progress toward democracy were made possible by the active intervention of the federal government.

Harold Washington

#93. The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.

Neil Gaiman

#94. The 21st century is going to be the American century. Because we lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example. That is the history of the journey of America.

Joe Biden

#95. Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.

Edmund Morgan

#96. Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can.

Arthur Ashe

#97. The central fact of North American history is that there were fifteen British Colonies before 1776. Thirteen rebelled and two did not.

June Callwood

#98. We wonder if we will be the first generation in American history to leave our children with fewer opportunities and a less prosperous nation than the one we inherited.

Paul Ryan

#99. I am the first African-American chairman of any major conservation organization in history. That's a big step.

Jerome Ringo

#100. The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.

Bernie Sanders