Top 100 Stephen Ambrose Quotes
#2. But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.
Oliver Stone
#3. Even before Watergate and his resignation, Nixon had inspired conflicting and passionate emotions.
Stephen Ambrose
#5. Washington's character was rock solid. He came to stand for the new nation and its republican virtues, which was why he became our first President by unanimous choice.
Stephen Ambrose
#6. Pvt. Robert Fruling said he spent two and a half days at Pointe-du-Hoc, all of it crawling on his stomach. He returned on the twenty-fifth anniversary of D-Day "to see what the place looked like standing up" (Louis Lisko interview, EC).
Stephen E. Ambrose
#7. There is not a day that has passed since that I do not thank Adolf Hitler for allowing me to be associated with the most talented and inspiring group of men that I have ever known. Every member of Easy interviewed by this author for this book said something similar.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#8. Almost everything Truman did in foreign affairs I approve of.
Stephen Ambrose
#9. The American Constitution is the greatest governing document, and at some 7,000 words, just about the shortest.
Stephen Ambrose
#10. Washington, not Jefferson, freed his slaves upon his death.
Stephen Ambrose
#11. Writing is not the easiest way to make a living. Your work long hours, usually all by yourself. It is not a way to make money.
Stephen Ambrose
#12. All that existed was precious in Crazy Horse's religion - whatever a man did or thought was good, was wakan, so long as he obeyed his own inner voice, for that too was wakan.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#13. There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#14. The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.
Stephen Ambrose
#15. British and Free French in the Mediterranean were fighting to retain their colonial empires. Roosevelt said he hoped to
Stephen E. Ambrose
#16. Nixon regarded himself as having been cheated by life. He never got my vote.
Stephen Ambrose
#17. All men ultimately want to know two things - 'To whom do I owe thanks that I should live in such opportunity?' And, 'Will I have the courage when the time comes?
Stephen Ambrose
#18. The great wars of the 20th Century made it into the worst Century ever.
Stephen Ambrose
#19. You can manufacture weapons, and you can purchase ammunition, but you can't buy valor and you can't pull heroes off an assembly line.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#21. Eisenhower is my choice as the American of the 20th Century. Of all the men I've studied and written about, he is the brightest and the best.
Stephen Ambrose
#22. It all happened," Lipton summed up, "because Shifty saw a tree almost a mile away that hadn't been there the day before.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#23. Oftentimes the fascinating thing is that people who are seen as commanding figures at the moment that they were considered for President and did not run turned out to be treated by history as much more minor figures politically.
Stephen Ambrose
#24. Custer had dead heroes. Crazy Horse had only live ones.
Stephen Ambrose
#25. There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.
Stephen Ambrose
#26. I instinctively dislike ever to uphold the conservative as opposed to the bold
Stephen E. Ambrose
#27. In the 19th century, we devoted our best minds to exploring nature. In the 20th century, we devoted ourselves to controlling and harnessing it. In the 21st century, we must devote ourselves to restoring it.
Stephen Ambrose
#28. Was to filter hair tonic through bread and then mix it with grape juice. Like virtually every other drink devised in the Pacific, it was known as Jungle Juice.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#30. I was taught by professors who had done their schooling in the 1930s. Most of them were scornful of, even hated, big business.
Stephen Ambrose
#32. Lieutenant Welsh remembered walking around among the sleeping men, and thinking to himself that 'they had looked at and smelled death all around them all day but never even dreamed of applying the term to themselves. They hadn't come here to fear. They hadn't come to die. They had come to win.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#33. U.S. history that while the nation fought its greatest war against the world's worst racist, it maintained a segregated army abroad and a total system of discrimination at home.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#34. During the Second World War, the Germans took four years to build the Atlantic Wall. On four beaches it held up the Allies for about an hour; at Omaha it held up the U.S. for less than one day. The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.
Stephen Ambrose
#35. You lead by fear or you lead by example. We were being led by fear.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#37. Washington and Jefferson were both rich Virginia planters, but they were never friends.
Stephen Ambrose
#38. It does you no good to see the number two or number three man in the corporation-you have to get through to number one.
Stephen Ambrose
#40. You don't hate history, you hate the way it was taught to you in high school.
Stephen Ambrose
#41. In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ranney wrote: "In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I'm treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?'
No,'" I answered, 'but I served in a company of heroes.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#42. Neither Johnson nor his party nor the government as a whole were willing to raise, train, equip, and then send Vietnam sufficient manpower to do the job.
Stephen Ambrose
#43. I think that the opportunity to improve race relations in the United States has been put off temporarily.
Stephen Ambrose
#44. The medics were the most popular, respected, and appreciated men in the company. Their weapons were first-aid kits, their place on the line was wherever a man called out that he was wounded.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#45. Nor did the Americans find it necessary to wage a ruthless campaign. As has been mentioned previously, both sides respected
Stephen E. Ambrose
#46. In 1945, there were more people killed, more buildings destroyed, more high explosives set off, more fires burning than before or since.
Stephen Ambrose
#47. Although both men were full of resolve, the defender could not keep his doubts out of his mind, while the attacker refused to entertain any doubts. (Rommel vs. Eisenhower)
Stephen E. Ambrose
#48. My favorite book is the last one printed, which is always better than those that were published earlier.
Stephen Ambrose
#49. whiskey. The chiefs were "exceedingly fond of it, they took up an empty bottle, Smelted it, and made maney Simple jestures and Soon began to be troublesom." Clark
Stephen E. Ambrose
#50. Failure at one point could throw the momentum out of balance and result in chaos. All in that room were aware
Stephen E. Ambrose
#51. The more sophisticated we get, the more advanced our buildings and vehicles become, the more vulnerable we are.
Stephen Ambrose
#53. That extra special, elite, close feeling started under the stress Capt. Sobel created at Camp Toccoa. Under that stress, the only way the men could survive was to bond together. Eventually, the noncoms had to bond together in a mutiny.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#55. I thought Nixon was the worst President we had ever had, save only perhaps Andrew Johnson.
Stephen Ambrose
#56. To be a slaveholder meant one had to regard the African American as inferior in every way.
Stephen Ambrose
#57. Jefferson owned slaves. He did not believe that all were created equal. He was a racist.
Stephen Ambrose
#58. Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.
Stephen Ambrose
#59. Who today is willing to say that Texas and California and the remainder of the Southwest would be better off if they were governed by Mexico?
Stephen Ambrose
#60. Within Easy Company they had made the best friends they had ever had, or would ever have. They were prepared to die for each other; more important, they were prepared to kill for each other.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#61. As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am conpelled to beleive differently.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#62. Nothing is inevitable in life. People make choices, and those choices have results, and we all live with the results.
Stephen Ambrose
#64. The Enlightenment taught that observation unrecorded was knowledge lost.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#65. The first man stepped up to the open door. All the men had been ordered to look out at the horizon, not straight down, for obvious psychological reasons.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#66. Dams have harmed our wildlife and made rivers less useful for recreation.
Stephen Ambrose
#68. We are part of a country that outshines those that have gone before us and most of those in existence today.
Stephen Ambrose
#69. When Hitler declared war on the United States, he was betting that German soldiers, raised up in the Hitler Youth, would always out fight American soldiers, brought up in the Boy Scouts. He lost that bet. The Boy Scouts had been taught how to figure their way out of their own problems.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#70. Sobel was Jewish, urban, with a commission from the National Guard. Hester had started as a private, then earned his commission from Officer Candidate's School (OCS). Most
Stephen E. Ambrose
#71. The Canadians have managed to live peacefully with their Indians. It is disgrace that the United States has not done the same.
Stephen Ambrose
#72. Johnson had been the most powerful man in the world, yet the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong had resisted, overcome his power, broken his will.
Stephen Ambrose
#73. If you want to be a hero, the Germans will make one out of you real quick - dead!
Stephen E. Ambrose
#74. It would not be possible to praises nurses too highly.
Stephen Ambrose
#75. Todd says that the doctor was rather horrified because we passed a German who had had his head shot off, but his arms and legs were still waving about and strange noises were coming out of him, and i thought even the doctor was a bit turned over by that.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#76. In America, Jefferson noted with approval, women knew their place.
Stephen Ambrose
#77. History of the United States in the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson,
Stephen E. Ambrose
#78. One observer estimated that in 1901 Texas alone had eight hundred million prairie dogs.4 Jack rabbits were nearly as numerous. Antelope and deer numbered in the millions, as did the wolves and coyotes, and there were thousands of elk, bear, and other game.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#80. All this was part of the initiation rites common to all armies. So was learning to drink. Beer, almost exclusively, at the post PX, there being no nearby towns. Lots of beer. They sang soldiers' songs. Toward
Stephen E. Ambrose
#81. I've always tried to be fair to my subjects. That's easy when they are as likable and admirable as Lewis and Clark, or Eisenhower.
Stephen Ambrose
#83. Like their predecessors, the Presidents of today just throw up their hands.
Stephen Ambrose
#84. World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.
Stephen Ambrose
#85. Chickenshit is so called - instead of horse- or bull- or elephant shit - because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#86. Older British observers complained, "The trouble with you Yanks is that you are overpaid, oversexed, and over here." (To which the Yanks would reply, "The trouble with you Limeys is that you are underpaid, undersexed, and under Eisenhower.")
Stephen E. Ambrose
#87. Neighbors are far better acoustic analyzers for determining the quality of their life versus any acoustic instrument left unattended by an expert.
Stephen Ambrose
#88. Andrew Johnson was a Southerner generally who proclaimed that his native state of Tennessee was a country for white men.
Stephen Ambrose
#89. We can't make you do anything, but we can make you wish you had. - Army saying
Stephen E. Ambrose
#90. The Natchez Trace seemed much safer to him than risking a sailboat from New Orleans to Washington,
Stephen E. Ambrose
#91. At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and won, and we all of us, living and yet to be born, must be forever profoundly grateful.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#92. I'm no politician. I'm an historian who has learned through a lifetime of studying that nothing in the world beats universal education.
Stephen Ambrose
#94. Winters, Matheson, Nixon, and the others existed," Private Rader remembered. "These were first-class people, and to think these men would care and share their time and efforts with us seemed a miracle. They
Stephen E. Ambrose
#96. The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#97. The German today is like the June Bride. He knows he is going to get it, but he doesn't know how big it is going to be.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#98. Crazy Horse saw history as integrated in the present, incorporated into daily life.
Stephen Ambrose
#99. Eisenhower had the clearest blue eyes. He would fix them on you. In my every interview with him, he would lock his eyes on to mine and keep them there.
Stephen Ambrose
#100. At the hangars, each jumpmaster was given two packs of papers, containing an order of the day from Eisenhower and a message from Colonel Sink, to pass around to the men. "Tonight is the night of nights," said Sink's. "May God be with
Stephen E. Ambrose
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
