Top 100 Quotes About American History
#1. The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.
John Henrik Clarke
#2. The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.
In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.
Tim Wise
#3. Kennedy's immigration law was enacted during the magical post-1964 period, when Congress had free rein to push through the craziest left-wing legislation since the New Deal. It was the most destructive period in American history.
Ann Coulter
#4. Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American history.
Cybill Shepherd
#5. It would be unwise for the modern Republican Party to come across as hostile to immigration. That has been the losing position in American history for 200 years.
Grover Norquist
#6. I was reading newspaper front pages from the 1930s, and I was taken aback. I'm not naive about American history, but I was a bit knocked off my feet by things that used to be on the front pages of newspapers.
Daniel Woodrell
#7. I know something about the civilization of China, with my background, obviously, and I think I know something about American history. But that's about all. And I've traveled all over the world, and for a long time I didn't know very much about it, really.
I.M. Pei
#8. It's disappointing that President Obama - who ran for office in 2008 saying he was going to be a fiscally responsible president - has caused the largest deficits and the largest debt in American history.
Raul Labrador
#9. Codifying discrimination in our laws should be something we read about in American history, not on the front pages of today's American newspapers and magazines.
Dannel Malloy
#10. The school curriculum today, particularly American history, is a shame.
Rush Limbaugh
#11. It feels a bit like high school, only with guns and uniforms, and instead of learning trigonometry or North American history, we learn better ways to kill people and blow up their stuff.
Marko Kloos
#12. If Mitt Romney defeats President Obama in his bid for reelection on Tuesday, it will mark the success of one of the most deeply cynical political campaigns in American history. It is hard to beat an incumbent no matter the economic climate.
Juan Williams
#13. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.
Frederick Jackson Turner
#14. < ... > tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.
David Brion Davis
#15. Bill Clinton beat Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, for the White House in 1992 by focusing on 'the economy, stupid' - and Clinton's victory led, in time, to the longest sustained boom in American history.
Nigel Hamilton
#16. I walked out of Spielberg's 'Lincoln' having such a thirst for more. It used such a microscopic albeit enormous event in American history. It used such a small piece of his presidency to illustrate him as a president through the lens of that event.
Jesse Johnson
#17. English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.
Malcolm Bradbury
#18. President Obama is the most successful food stamp president in American history. I would like to be the most successful paycheck president in American history.
Newt Gingrich
#19. There have been many amazing Presidents in American history, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, all of whom I greatly admire.
Donald Trump
#20. 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.
Timothy Ferriss
#22. I'm covering the worst president in American history.
Helen Thomas
#23. President Obama is perhaps the most ideologically-motivated president in American history. But according to the ultimate authority, Barack Obama, he's a mere pragmatist.
Ben Shapiro
#24. He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
H.L. Mencken
#25. Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.
Carl Bernstein
#26. When President Teddy Roosevelt posed for the cameras astride a massive steam shovel during construction of the Panama Canal in 1906, it was more than a simple photo op. Though the scene was clearly staged, it symbolized a crucial moment in American history.
Alan Huffman
#27. I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.
Anson Mount
#28. Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.
Oscar Handlin
#29. What's four years in our long American history? Remember when I asked that wheelchair-bound politician to "stand up." It turns me off when people say Donald Trump is authentic. Just because he says "Mexican rapists." What about me? I am the real deal.
Joe Biden
#30. When you have the worst disaster in American history, you've got to be attuned to expectations,.
Charles Krauthammer
#31. We're the first people of the Western Hemisphere. American history doesn't start with Plymouth Rock; it starts with our ancestors. Others might call us "wetbacks," but we've had 40,000 years to dry out.
Mario T. Garcia
#32. Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.
James W. Loewen
#33. The men and women who occupied the east coast of North America between 1607 and 1800 have been more closely scrutinized than any other collection of people in American history.
Edmund Morgan
#34. Venice has been the living future of contemporary American history since its inception.
Liam Neeson
#35. Jimmy Carter will go down in American history as 'the president who lost Iran,'
Barack Obama
#36. A President and his wise men can only propose; but Congress disposes. It is when President and Congress agree that American history marches forward.
Theodore White
#37. 'Hamilton' is one of the best things I've ever seen on a stage, and for a guy who loves American history, hip-hop and theater, it was pure bliss.
Cory Booker
#38. Students of American history will recall that the important place where work gets done in the legislative body, almost without exception, is in the committees, more so than on the floor although sometimes more attention is paid to the floor.
Paul Sarbanes
#39. Imagine if Congress were actually knowledgeable of American history.
Jim Harrison
#40. The great and abiding lesson of American history, particularly the cold war, is that the engine of capitalism, the individual, is mightier than any collective.
Rand Paul
#41. Barack Obama is one of the greatest politicians in American history.
John Podhoretz
#42. I think people should look at learning about Native American history the same as visiting Washington, D.C., and seeing the monuments there. It's all part of the package.
Chaske Spencer
#43. American history is not something dead and over. It is always alive,always growing, always unfinished.
John F. Kennedy
#44. Cotton Mather is one of those classic figures of American history who can't be left out. One has to explain him or explain him away, redeem him or denounce him.
Edmund Morgan
#45. Sin in the Second City is a masterful history lesson, a harrowing biography, and - best of all - a superfun read. The Everleigh story closely follows the turns of American history like a little sister. I can't recommend this book loudly enough.
Darin Strauss
#46. My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.
John Edgar Wideman
#47. 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.
Louis Stokes
#48. I started drumming around the same time I came across this part of American history. But there seemed to be a way forward playing drums. There didn't seem to be a way forward being fascinated by a piece of history.
Phil Collins
#50. It's not painful to relive it. I'm comfortable with my position in American history.
Rodney King
#51. There have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal. Sometimes to do the right thing you have to break the law.
Edward Snowden
#52. My mom was a history teacher, so I couldn't really avoid history when I was growing up. But we're very light on American history. We don't really have great opportunities to study both the Civil War and the Revolution.
Owain Yeoman
#53. It's a deal that will lead to a nuclear Iran, an Israel that will be less safe and secure, and a much more dangerous Middle East. Let's ask it: Hillary Clinton, as an inept negotiator of the worst nuclear arms deal in American history. Is she guilty or not guilty?
Chris Christie
#54. A man I admire and respect - Congressman John Lewis, an American hero, made allegations that Sarah Palin and I were somehow associated with the worst chapter in American history, segregation, deaths of children in church bombings, George Wallace. That, to me, was so hurtful.
John McCain
#55. Hurricane Katrina is without question the worst natural disaster in American history,.
Douglas Brinkley
#56. I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.
Larry Wall
#57. I don't know anything about American history or presidents. I don't know what tailgating is! I've never been to an Olive Garden!
Emma Watson
#58. My interest in writing about American history stemmed originally, I think, from a subconscious desire to find roots - I felt like a girl without a country. I have put down roots quite firmly by now, but in the process, I have discovered the joys of research and am probably hooked.
Jean Fritz
#59. Black history isn't a separate history. This is all of our history, this is American history, and we need to understand that. It has such an impact on kids and their values and how they view black people.
Karyn Parsons
#60. This was supposedly an Honors American History class, for seniors only. What deep, dark secrets of American History needed to be kept from younger minds? Were they going to talk about Washington's VD? Lincoln's warts? Roosevelt's hemorrhoids?
Melodie Starkey
#61. I'm so proud of myself. I thought, 'I've got to learn about American history.' I literally took two months off and watched every documentary known to man. I really didn't know Benjamin Franklin was so cool.
Rene Russo
#62. My challenge was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly.
John Hope Franklin
#63. 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.
Hari Kunzru
#64. Jerry Garcia was a great American master and the Grateful Dead are not just a genuine piece of musical history, but also an important part of American history,
Trey Anastasio
#65. Conflict with the United States is one of the overwhelming facts of Latin American history.
Stephen Kinzer
#66. The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.
Alysia Abbott
#67. Any of the social changes in American history are because people thought there was injustice. We have to show that this corporate welfare and cronyism is unjust - and that it's not only rigging the system so people get wealthy who don't deserve to get wealthy.
Charles Koch
#68. I can't understand why I flunked American history. When I was a kid there was so little of it.
George Burns
#69. I can never do justice to the great feeling of amazement and encouragement I felt when, perhaps for the first time in American history, white citizens of a Southern state banded together to come to Selma and show their indignation about the injustices against the African-Americans.
Amelia Boynton Robinson
#70. The trouble with American History is that you don't remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.
Barbara Holland
#71. American history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation.
Herbert Croly
#72. Personally, I can't see the appeal in trekking down to D.C. for a networking extravaganza, even if it is built around a special moment in American history. While I find the election of Barack Obama inspirational, I don't have a desire to memorialize it with overly effusive celebration.
Jamie Johnson
#73. The struggle between centralization and decentralization is at the core of American history.
Anthony Gregory
#74. If we don't empower families to be able to have a quality education, then their children - for the first time in American history, truly the first time - will not have the same economic opportunities.
Jeb Bush
#75. The book 'A Reliable Wife' is a slice of American history. It takes a part of American history and tells a story about the purchase of a wife by a Wisconsin businessman. The research of that would have been really interesting.
Patti LuPone
#76. When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.
Philipp Meyer
#77. FEW PEOPLE in American history have been as consistently disliked as the Puritans.
Jim Cullen
#78. Let's go beyond the Trinity of African-American History. There are so many more to learn about other than Harriett Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks.
Karimah Grayson
#79. In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.
Newt Gingrich
#80. Clarence Darrow, America's best-known trial lawyer, was also one of American history's most skilled orators.
Jill Lepore
#81. American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.
Gore Vidal
#82. No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.
Edward Abbey
#83. John Kerry's wife Teresa Heinz is on the cover of Newsweek magazine this week and they said that if he is elected president, she will be the oldest first lady in American history. But that doesn't bother John Kerry, he said, 'To me, she looks like a million bucks'
Jay Leno
#84. I don't have a problem with these Arizona laws. I have a problem with Chicano, Gay and Lesbian, Asian-American and African-American histories not being taught in American History courses.
M.G. Hardie
#85. A trillion dollars spent, 2,000 American lives lost - Afghanistan is the longest war in American history. But you don't hear a word about it.
Michael Baumgartner
#86. The present illegitimacy ratio is not only unprecedented in the past two centuries; it is unprecedented, so far as we know, in American history going back to colonial times, and in English history from Tudor times.
Gertrude Himmelfarb
#87. Now, thanks to President [Barack] Obama and the policies of Democrats when we have been able to achieve 73 straight months of sustained growth in the private sector. The longest it has been in American history.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz
#88. There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#89. I think the Lewis and Clark Expedition was the greatest undertaking in American History. I think landing a man on the moon pales next to it.
Kathryn Lasky
#90. Tony Kaye is great with that kind of stuff. Up until American History X, he had only done commercials.
Ethan Suplee
#91. The conversation seemed just as boring and forgettable as details of American history around 1805, for example.
Patricia Highsmith
#92. ...the fight that political philosophers have always identified as the central conflict in human history: that between the individual and society. Thus far, scholars have shown little interest in finding this conflict in American history...
Thaddeus Russell
#93. To support its conclusion that 'this is a religious people ... this is a Christian nation,' the Court paraded a veritable litany of precedents from American history: taken from Church of the Holy Trinity v. U.S.; 143 U.S. 457-458 (1892).
David Barton
#94. Students of reading, writing and common arithmetick ... Graecian [Greek], Roman, English and American history ... should be rendered ... worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.
Thomas Jefferson
#95. I'll change the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.
Barack Obama
#96. The wort terrorist attack in American history also brought out the best in our country ... We are United as Americans.
Barack Obama
#97. Obama has been the single worst president in modern American history in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Reza Aslan
#98. He enjoys the surprise on people's faces when he tells them he's a professor of American history. "Well, I am American," he says when people blink, a barb of defensiveness in his tone. Someone
Celeste Ng
#99. In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material, and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.
Daniel Ellsberg
#100. I think that America is a nation of faith. I do believe that. Certainly by way of heritage - there's a powerful Christian thread through all of American history.
John Edwards
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