Top 100 The Civil War Quotes
#1. During the civil war, the Sudanese government armed the Misseriya nomads as proxy. Even though both groups had coexisted quite well prior to the conflict, it all become much more difficult as a consequence.
Rebecca Hamilton
#2. Jewish fundamentalism is teaching that Jews can fight with guns and with civil war, against being relocated off the West Bank, and disobey the orders of their government. That is the call to jihad, to several kinds of jihad.
Arthur Hertzberg
#3. Some of the greatest spiritual revivals in the past occurred just when the situation seemed to be the darkest. In the history of our own nation, for example, countless thousands turned to Christ during the darkest days of the Civil War, setting the stage for national reconciliation later on.
Billy Graham
#4. Passionate intimacy between people of the same sex was common in pre - Civil War America. The lack of clear sexual categories (homo-, hetero-, bi-) made same-sex affection unself-conscious and widespread.
David S. Reynolds
#5. The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.
Umberto Eco
#6. Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.
Blaise Pascal
#7. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: "I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."34
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
#8. With the likely nominations of Barack Obama by the Democrats and John McCain by the Republicans, one of these two parties is headed for a 2009 crack-up that could prove as messy as any party civil war in recent history.
Chuck Todd
#9. Even to an outsider like myself, not only in the theatre was such disunity evident, but in much else in government Spain. Alvarez del Vayo, Socialist Minister of Foreign Affairs, once asked, Why is it Spain's people are so great, but her leaders so small?
Langston Hughes
#10. Ty Cobb was still fighting the Civil War, and as far as he was concerned, we were all damn Yankees. But who knows, if he hadn't had that terrible persecution complex, he never would have been about the best ballplayer who ever lived.
Sam Crawford
#11. England's civil war had ended in a consensus as the English discovered that they hated foreigners more than they hated their own countrymen.
Len Deighton
#12. I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.
Jerry Spinelli
#13. Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals or forts.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#14. The Lebanese civil war was not between the Lebanese; it was a holy war declared on the Christians.
Brigitte Gabriel
#15. Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national 'pretexts,' led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.
Ernst Junger
#16. I don't have to come back politically, but I would like to do something that will help the people of Thailand. There must be a process under which I can come back. I want to come back to clear the chaos in Thailand, the civil war in Thailand.
Thaksin Shinawatra
#17. Rebel Number Four" is waiting patiently by the door. I named him "Rebel Number Four," for he is the fourth of his kind I have given the name "Rebel." To many he may be just a hound dog, but to me he is a champion and a friend to the end.
Nancy B. Brewer
#18. We can only imagine the history of the free world today if, at the end of the Civil War, there had been two countries: the United States and the Confederate States of America.
Douglas Brinkley
#19. As the histories of ancient and modern democracies illustrate, the pressure of political movement in times of war, civil commotion, or general anxiety pushes in the direction of authority, not away from it.
Robert Heilbroner
#20. The United States came within a whisker of invading Utah in 1858 and starting a civil war three years before the Civil War. Because the conflict ended up fizzling out, it's not the most dramatic story about the West.
David Roberts
#21. [On John Brown:] The poor wretch is hanged, but from his grave a root of bitterness will spring, the fruit of which at no distant day may be disunion and civil war.
Fanny Kemble
#22. In case we have to shoot Democrats. It happened during the Civil War, and it could happen again.
P. J. O'Rourke
#23. This was one of the consequences of the civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy.
Ishmael Beah
#24. I'm in the infantry. What you just showed me, for us that's not even good pornography.
Henry V. O'Neil
#25. Today's breakfast consist of rice and a piece of bread fried in a bit of salt pork grease. At least I have my memories of grand banquets and fine foods, but this is all the children have ever known. I suppose it is best not to have anything to compare.
Nancy B. Brewer
#26. It was not an unusual site to see Negro tenant farmers crossing the intersection of Spring and Barbrick on the way to the cotton warehouse
Nancy B. Brewer
#27. Our union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war.
James Buchanan
#28. A South Carolina native, Miles was a lawyer, a mayor of Charleston, and a congressman. He was one of his state's "fire-eaters," a term applied to men who openly advocated secession rather than finding accomodation with the Union in the summer and fall of 1860.
Clint Johnson
#29. When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.
Andrea Mitchell
#30. Western civilization, Christianity, decency are struggling for their very lives. In this worldwide civil war, race prejudice is our most dangerous enemy, for it is a disease at the very root of our democratic life.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#31. Martial sex is kinda like ordering a Civil War chess set through the mail. You get one piece every four to six weeks, you don't know what kind of shape that piece is gonna be in when you get it, but you still gotta pay the handling charges.
Bill Engvall
#32. What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.
Jonathan Sacks
#33. Don't know when my life came to visualising intense pain and tragedy to putting it down on paper, to putting across a message of love in times of abject hate. Thank you everybody and the conspiracy of the stars for showing me this day. To many, many more books, inshallah, and to many more launches.
Simran Keshwani
#34. Abraham Lincoln - the spirit incarnate of those who won victory in the Civil War - was the true representative of this people, not only for his own generation, but for all time, because he was a man among men.
Theodore Roosevelt
#35. The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.
Bernard Bailyn
#37. In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.
Ishmael Beah
#38. The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
H.L. Mencken
#39. When the communists won the Chinese civil war in 1949, they accepted neither the semi-independence of Tibet nor the boundary lines drawn by British imperialism between Tibet and India.
Bruce Riedel
#40. The course of George St. Leger Grenfell's life was a continuing act of violence against the sanctities of Victorian life, and especially against its inmost essence, the family. And indeed, the large Grenfell family was an overpowering aggregation, even by the ample Victorian standard.
Stephen Z. Starr
#41. The worst wars are religious wars between sects of the same religion or civil wars between brothers of the same race.
Ayn Rand
#42. In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last
George Orwell
#43. Louisa went about her duties at the hospital, trying not to dwell on the fact that this might be her last day alive.
David Healey
#44. No human mind may measure the blessings conferred by the game of base ball on the soldiers of the Civil War. It had its earliest evolution when soldiers, North and South, were striving to forget their foes by cultivating, through this grand game, fraternal friendships with comrades in arms.
Albert Goodwill Spalding
#45. Probably half the cases of Civil War dead were not identified. And so there was no way to let loved ones know, and there were no regularized processes in either Northern or Southern Army for notifying next of kin.
Drew Gilpin Faust
#46. For that matter I didn't understand Civil War reenactments. Why would you celebrate the biggest thing you ever lost? I quickly learned not to give voice to such skepticisms, and when asked if I was a Yankee I said I didn't follow baseball closely. That usually shut the person up.
Patricia Cornwell
#47. My grandparents moved to Texas from the South after the U.S. Civil War and settled on small farms in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area.
Robert Woodrow Wilson
#48. I used to think that the Civil War was our country's greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.
Sam Ervin
#49. This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
H.L. Mencken
#50. The war, the American Civil War of 1861-1865, would never have been possible without the sinister influence of the Jesuits.
Abraham Lincoln
#51. Lincoln replied:"There is a difference between secession against the Constitution and in favor of the Constitution.
Clint Johnson
#52. I came at age in the '60s, and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time - the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.
David Talbot
#53. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.
Dan Savage
#54. A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression.
Arthur Miller
#55. Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep - not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.
Nick Turse
#56. The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the victory and the South the glory.
Richard M. Weaver
#57. The Civil War won formal rights for Negroes, but failed to win social justice and factual democracy. The actual result has been segregation, and fear and ignorance for both whites and blacks.
Paul Goodman
#58. It is probably true that I would not have had as many children or mothers in my books without being a mother with children. It is definitely true that I would not have written about the Civil War without having a little guy who was obsessed with it.
Marly Youmans
#59. I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.
Ken Burns
#60. I am trying to prevent a bloodbath. Is that clear enough for you? I'm trying to prevent a civil war that could kill half the people in this world.
Larry Niven
#61. In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you ... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.
Abraham Lincoln
#62. America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.
Marco Rubio
#63. I was against the Iraq war I was against the Afghan war I was against bombing Libya and Syria but to be quite honest and with a heavy heart because more innocent people are gonna be killed....We have to step in and help wipeout ISIS!
Cal Sarwar
#64. Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#65. The drive to scale in almost every endeavor. The British went very large scale in ship building and a few other industries. Their steel plants were bigger and much more advanced than ours after the Civil War, but we had blown past them by the mid-80s.
Charles R. Morris
#67. Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who ... even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.
Susan Jacoby
#68. The post-war loss of Churchill may have damaged the Western world with the same impact as the post-civil war world was damaged by the loss of Lincoln.
Warren Adler
#69. The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there's a reason for that - the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent - No Child Left Behind.
P. J. O'Rourke
#70. Died of wounds inflicted in error by his own troops at the battle of Chancellorsville during the US Civil War. Let us cross over the river and sit in the shade of the trees.
Stonewall Jackson
#71. Compromise where you can. Where you can't, don't. Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right. Even if the whole world is telling you to move, it is your duty to plant yourself like a tree, look them in the eye, and say 'No, you move'.
Christopher Markus
#72. In the end, no amount of American forces can solve the political differences that lie at the heart of somebody else's civil war.
Barack Obama
#73. Some wars," he said dismissively. "What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart is made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner.
John Green
#74. We live a life of privilege. That doesn't mean we can literally switch off these women, whose only fault was being born in the Congo during civil war. We need to bear witness.
Maria Semple
#75. I'd done the method bit before from, like, age 15 to 19. I was a Civil War re-enactor.
Cary Fukunaga
#76. Further, more African Americans today are under criminal justice supervision - either in prison, on parole or probation - than were enslaved 10 years before the Civil War (Alexander 2012
Merrill Singer
#77. Soon after, Tom, all of twenty years old, became the only soldier in the Civil War to win two Medals of Honor. In
Nathaniel Philbrick
#78. The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things ... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.
Shelby Foote
#79. We want to keep the actual Civil War experience alive.
Bobby Riggs
#80. The understanding of Syria's devastating civil war has been distorted by the immense danger and difficulty of covering it.
Nancy Gibbs
#81. We did an album one time called White Mansions, about the civil war, but it was written by a guy from England. His looking at it from over there and it not being a part of his history made it so he could be objective.
Waylon Jennings
#82. On this night of the Harvest Moon. They tossed bones into the "Bone Fire" and asked the yellow moon to shine its protection over them. (Today we call it a "Bonfire")
Nancy B. Brewer
#83. A Failure in this Duty did once involve our Nation in all the Horrors of Rebellion and Civil War.
Charles Inglis
#84. I was raised on the Hudson, in a house that had been the stable of the financier and Civil War general Brayton Ives. In midcentury, we had fire pits in the floor for heating, and rats everywhere, because they nested in the hay insulation.
Mark Helprin
#85. Freelancing in Somalia during their civil war and in Kuwait right after the first Bush War, I had some rather intense experiences that made life in the U.S. seem rather shallow and superfluous.
Peter Menzel
#86. Before the Civil War, the Southern states were selling a lot of cotton to England and didn't seem to mind British occupation. By and large, the Revolutionary War wasn't at all great for business.
Henry Rollins
#87. The weapons that helped turn what had been initially peaceful demonstrations in Syria into ruthless civil war were delivered to Turkey with the USA's kind permission, either by ship in gigantic cargo containers or by air. From
Jurgen Todenhofer
#88. Causes of Civil War are also, that the Wealth of the Nation is in too few mens hands, and that no certain means are provided to keep all men from a necessity either to beg, or steal, or be Souldiers.
William Petty
#89. I think a lot of Civil War stuff is written - As they say, history is written by the victors. And one of the things that I think is fascinating about this from a purely dramatic perspective is whether someone is right or wrong, you understand where they're coming from in this.
Josh Radnor
#90. 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
#91. There are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began.
Michelle Alexander
#92. The terrorists want civil war. Al-Qaida is attacking Shiites. The Shiite militias are taking revenge on the Sunnis. And the Sunnis are become more extremist, with some joining al-Qaida.
Zalmay Khalilzad
#93. The Greek Civil War led to three decades of illegality for the Left, which had to operate under front organisations. The Cold War entrenched in power - backed by the US and Britain - a monarchist, authoritarian right for whom political violence was customary.
Anonymous
#94. War! It is purification, liberation, an enormous hope ... The victory of Germany will be a paradox, nay, a wonder: a victory of the soul over numbers ... The German soul is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization, for is not peace the element, of civil corruption?
Thomas Mann
#95. You know, the thing that struck me about Civil War music was how bloody it was; it was full of hatred. There was incredible vitriol in it.
T Bone Burnett
#96. Jason smiled. The sound of wings was louder now, the fluttering of angels come to carry him home.
Robert Ferrigno
#98. The rules of war for federal court were contained in the 86 rules of federal civil procedure, the rules of the local federal court, and the courtroom rules of the particular federal judge.
Kenneth Eade
#99. That doesn't sound like civil war to me," said Gaylen, turning back to his book with a smile. "It only sounds silly."
"Of course it's silly," said the Prime Minister impatiently. "But a lot of serious things start silly.
Natalie Babbitt
#100. I was a child during the Lebanese civil war, and I remember Israeli bombardments. So growing up, my view of Israel was completely negative. I'm not coming from a neutral place, but with time, I've had to re-examine my thinking.
Ziad Doueiri