Top 100 Quotes About Civil War
#1. Unlike the people you see in Mathew Brady's photographs from the Civil War, the men and women of the Revolution seem more like characters in a costume pageant. And it's a pageant in which the performers are all handsome as stage actors, with uniforms and dress that are always costume perfect.
David McCullough
#2. I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of the centuries lies on children, I'm sure of it.
Flannery O'Connor
#3. Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.
Niall Ferguson
#4. In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, our colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population of this country, to provide new markets ... The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question.
Cecil Rhodes
#5. Some call this civil war; others call it emergency
I call it pure evil.
George W. Bush
#6. 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
#7. Our statute books gradually became laden with gross, stereotyped distinctions between the sexes and, indeed, throughout much of the 19th century the position of women in our society was, in many respects, comparable to that of blacks under the pre-Civil War slave codes.
William J. Brennan
#8. This is one of the consequences of the civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy. Even people who knew you became extremely careful about how they related or spoke to you. (page 37)
Ishmael Beah
#9. The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.
George Packer
#10. What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset.
Andrew Young
#11. I don't care what your daddy told you. I don't care what your grandaddy told you. The South lost. Get over it man! -January, 2003; Opening lecture to Intro to Civil War Era Studies, Gettysburg College
Mark A. Weitz
#12. Occasionally, a re-enactment is a fine thing. I love Civil War re-enactments.
John Lydon
#14. There is no clear or meaningful difference between insurgency and civil war, or between national terrorism and civil war for that matter.
Anthony H. Cordesman
#15. Racial hatred in America still exists but never was it anything like the time immediately after the Civil War. The western history of our nation would not be complete without the story of former slaves that helped develop the unique character of the West.
William Silverman
#16. During the 1980s, international interest in the Nicaraguan war was intense. No conflict since the Spanish civil war had provoked such passion around the world. It was a classic good-versus-evil war.
Stephen Kinzer
#17. You might be a redneck if more than one living relative is named after a Southern Civil War general.
Jeff Foxworthy
#18. Right after the Civil War there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln's brief experiment with the Constitutional monetary system. Had not the European money-trust intervened, it would have no doubt become an established institution.
W. Cleon Skousen
#19. As one conservative intellectual said to me - he said if the choice is between [Joseph] Stalin and [Adolf] Hitler, I'd pick Stalin, meaning Ted Cruz because he's more predictable. So there's real civil war inside the Republican Party.
Mara Liasson
#20. I am the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. My mother is a survivor of both polio and of the Igbo genocide during her country's civil war in the late 1960s.
Uzo Aduba
#21. Unequal group rights, the politics of redistribution and a Constitution whose meaning varies with changeable coalitions are a recipe for civil war.
Paul Craig Roberts
#22. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War - when I really think about them, they all seem about as likely as the parting of the Red Sea.
Sarah Vowell
#23. The only thing Abner Doubleday ever started was the Civil War.
Branch Rickey
#24. Here we will solve with laws and dollars, problems that too many people around the world still must solve with violence and civil war.
Marco Rubio
#25. An apocryphal story recounts the dilhemma of a man during the Civil War who could not decide whether to join the Confederate or Union forces. Finally he put on a gray coat and blue pants, and both sides shot him.
John Frohnmayer
#26. When Lincoln ran into trouble during the Civil War, he got new generals. He brought in Grant. I hope that President Obama will bring in some new generals on the financial front.
Marcy Kaptur
#27. And we love to dance, especially that new one called the Civil War Twist. The Northern part of you stands still while the Southern part tries to secede.
Dick Gregory
#28. The Civil War was started over economic issues, not slavery. The War was not popular in the North until the issue of slavery was added at a later time to turn it into a moral crusade.
G. Edward Griffin
#29. Cape Cod baseball dates back to the time of the Civil War. A poster at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown touts a round-trip train ride from Hyannis to Sandwich on July 4, 1885 - the occasion of the 14th annual baseball game between Sandwich and Barnstable.
Jane Leavy
#30. I think in English history a very interesting character is John Lilburne. Very interesting character because of the way he managed to develop the whole debate about the English civil war into something very different.
Jeremy Corbyn
#31. Make us enemies of every people on earth, but save us from civil war.
Lucan
#32. I am deeply skeptical of re-entering into Iraq's civil war.
John Garamendi
#33. When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#34. It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides.
Erich Fromm
#35. To a mankind that recognizes the equality of man everywhere, every war becomes a civil war.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
#36. Jealousy is a kind of Civil War in the Soul, where Judgment and Imagination are at perpetual Jars.
Various
#37. Saladin had the same immediate successor as all the great Muslim leaders of his time: civil war. Barely had he died that his empire was dismembered.
Amine Maalouf
#38. When Ukrainians kill Ukrainians, I believe this is as close to a civil war as you can get.
Sergei Lavrov
#39. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady
Ernest Hemingway,
#40. Air power and military are meant to fight the enemy and not your own citizens ... How do you differentiate a Maoist? ... It will create a civil war-like situation.
Kishore Chandra Deo
#41. I hadn't had a chance to read an entire novel in weeks.
Whatever the others might say about politics, civil war, and hunters, the real evil was lack of reading time. If they all read more they might freak out less. And if I was going to live forever I was going to have to start a reading list.
Alyxandra Harvey
#42. The Civil War ravaged the Southern states, while leaving the North untouched.
Eustace Mullins
#43. Only in South Africa could you have a change in government without civil war. If there wasn't the depth of love and caring among our people, this would not have happened.
Patrice Motsepe
#44. You don't have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda. (On the Spanish Civil War, 1937)
Robert Capa
#45. Thus the rigid North-South interpretation of the Civil War conceals - and is intended to conceal - the active complicity of Democrats across the country to save, protect, and even extend the peculiar institution.
Dinesh D'Souza
#46. Philip could not have wanted to annex England militarily, since this would have opened another costly occupation struggle, and brought France in against him. He might, however, neutralize Elizabth by supporting her internal Catholic enemies, even provoking civil war.
Peter Padfield
#47. After the Civil War, when blacks fought along whites to secure freedom for all, southern states enacted Black Codes, laws that restricted the civil rights and liberties of blacks. Central to the enforcement of these laws were the stiff penalties for blacks possessing firearms.
Niger Innis
#48. In Montana, where Sen. William Andrews Clark made his fortune and lost his reputation, people had assumed that all his children were long dead. After all, he was born in 1839 and was of age to serve in the Civil War.
Bill Dedman
#49. A fundamental reason why Britain was not torn apart by civil war after 1688 was that its inhabitants' aggression was channelled so regularly and so remorsely into war and imperial expansion abroad.
Linda Colley
#50. From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#51. You cannot be President of the United States if you don't have faith. Remember Lincoln, going to his knees in times of trial in the Civil War and all that stuff.
George H. W. Bush
#52. Life has become terribly insecure. It's on the vortex of civil war. It's difficult to know how America will bring it back from the brink and build up good will.
Jon Lee Anderson
#53. In 'The Birth of a Nation,' Griffith made audiences see the Civil War through his eyes - the eyes of the son of a colonel in the Army of the Confederacy.
Richard Corliss
#54. There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.
John Negroponte
#55. Peace is defined as harmony among those who are divided. When, therefore, we end the civil war within our nature and cultivate peace within ourselves, we become at peace.
Gregory Of Nyssa
#56. Civil War was recorded by the original line-up
Dizzy Reed
#57. In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war.
Pankaj Mishra
#58. if at all, since the Civil War. In Greenwood, many black workers were still earning 30 cents an hour and returning huge profits for these Dixiecrat barons. For those who toiled in the fields there seemed only one hope. The ratio of black people to white
Ian Bell
#59. A war between Europeans is a civil war.
Victor Hugo
#60. Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.
Irving Thalberg
#61. You think that religion is a thing that is there to help you and to see you through life, and then you wake up one morning and find the entire Irish situation, the civil war that's based on religion.
Midge Ure
#62. For every person who died in the westward migration prior to the Civil War from Native Americans attacking, the stuff of American legends, thousands, maybe tens of thousands died from water holes polluted by cholera and typhoid . . . but that doesn't make for a good movie.
William R. Forstchen
#63. I was watching TV and saw people with masks, weapons, and grenades. I thought, Is that really possible? Could we be here yet again? And go into civil war one more time?
Nadine Labaki
#64. Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
Victor Hugo
#65. The Civil War was about a lot of things, but the core of it was slavery. That was the original sin.
John Fund
#66. Chinese authorities demonstrated during the climate-related civil war that began in Sudan in 2003 that they would support mass murderers when doing so seemed to serve their investments. In
Timothy Snyder
#67. I began to see during the civil war, in that part of the states of Missouri and Kansas where the doctors were shut out, the children did not die.
Andrew Taylor Still
#68. It may not be the "Great American Novel" they talk about, because its scope is not broad enough to take in all of America, but it pictures the people and the customs and the drama of upstate New York in the days preceding and following the Civil War with a simplicity that, to my mind, is true art.
Clyde Brion Davis
#69. Like so many great American fortunes, the Rosewater pile was accumulated in the beginning by a humorless, constipated Christian farm boy turned speculator and briber during and after the Civil War.
Kurt Vonnegut
#70. He raised his hands, not to strike, but in benediction. Lincoln was the grandest figure of the fiercest civil war. He is the gentlest memory of our world.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#71. For to me every sort of peace with the citizens seemed to be of more service than civil war.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#72. You go back and look at things like Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, a lot of people dying in state-sponsored arm conflict
Juan Williams
#73. The table was shocked. The entire class in fact. They'd heard tell of Civil War reenactments, but they were still occurring? The War Between the States was another time and another country. As was the South. Are barbers still surgeons? Is there still sharecropping? What about indoor plumbing?
T. Geronimo Johnson
#74. Until the Civil War there was scarcely a man in public life in New Orleans or Louisiana who had not fought at least one duel; most of them had engaged in several.
Herbert Asbury
#75. I wrote my first script, which was 50 pages, at age 15. It was about two brothers in love with the same nurse while they're convalescing in a Civil War hospital.
Cary Fukunaga
#76. A crucial Elite group behind the Civil War was the Knights of the Golden Circle, again based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
David Icke
#77. Before the civil war, Pottibakia was a normal member of the Comity of Nations. She erected tariff walls, broke treaties, persecuted minorities, obstructed at conferences unless she was convinced there was no danger of a satisfactory solution; then she strained every nerve in the cause of peace.
E. M. Forster
#78. In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.
Douglas A. Blackmon
#80. Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.
Noam Chomsky
#81. Everyone says we have our first African American president. Has there ever been a Jewish president? An Italian president? They don't say a damn thing about that. You think we're still fighting the Civil War or something. If you want to mention it in passing, OK. But don't dwell on it.
Monte Irvin
#82. This? I thought, after a twenty-year civil war: This? Armageddon I expected; but Armani I did not.
William Dalrymple
#83. [During the second Sudanese Civil War] what was actually killing us wasn't the Muslims, wasn't the Arabs. It was somebody sitting somewhere manipulating the system, and using religion to get what they want to get out of us, which is the oil, the diamond, the gold and the land.
Emmanuel Jal
#84. Frank Zhang, you should know!" Frank flinched. "I should?" "A son of Ares stood here!" Hedge cried indignantly. "I'm Roman ... so Mars, actually." "Whatever! Famous spot in the American Civil War!" "I'm Canadian, actually.
Rick Riordan
#85. Death created the modern American union, not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments. The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.
Drew Gilpin Faust
#86. Decision making can sometimes seem like inner civil war.
Jim Rohn
#87. The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990, spanned four World Cups. It would have been a more symmetrical five had the Lebanese begun in 1974, but you know, we're Mediterranean, and timing isn't our forte.
Rabih Alameddine
#88. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia [Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan recruiter] that he would have been a great senator at any moment ... He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this nation.
Christopher Dodd
#89. Some of the inspirations I had as far as following that story would be, like, say, "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly," the way they use the Civil War in that, or even the idea that - the movie that Leone was going to do before he died was going to be a movie about the battle of Stalingrad.
Quentin Tarantino
#90. You ever read Thucydides? I'll boil him down for you into one easy moral: intergenerational civil war is a very bad thing.
Adrian McKinty
#91. And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.
Michael Haneke
#92. Nor should the U.S. military be forced to remain in Iraq essentially as an army for one side of a civil war.
Peter DeFazio
#93. I come from a stupid family. During the civil war my great uncle fought for the west.
Rodney Dangerfield
#94. I have been trying to create a campaign to have our country make an apology for slavery, for the way that blacks were treated before the Civil War and after the Civil War.
Kirk Douglas
#95. Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'
W.E.B. Du Bois
#96. In 2001, I moved from Philly to Atlanta, where I lived for six years. I had never lived anywhere but Philly, and you can imagine the culture shock; the Civil War seeps into daily life and conversation down South in a way it never does up North.
Karen Abbott
#97. While they trace their history back to wars that helped to ethnically cleanse Native Americans and to their exploits in the Civil War fighting for the South, the modern-day Rangers were created to help rejuvenate a defeated and demoralized U.S. imperialism after the war in Vietnam.
Brendan Sexton III
#98. Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
Margaret Atwood
#99. When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core of women's lives. It's what they talked about most.
Drew Gilpin Faust
#100. Once the troops move into Cambodia, the colleges and universities of this country were on the verge of civil war. Many closed down. The students were up in arms. And it looked very much like there were going to be real problems in this country.
William Kunstler
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