The Civil War Quotes

#1. 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

#2. On the last morning of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea.

Patricia Cornwell

#3. I had an idea to write something set back around the Civil War era, but I was just way too ignorant to think I could start it any time soon.

John Brandon

#4. Harriet Tubman was a spy for the United States of America Union Army during the Civil War. 9.

Stephen R. Daily

#5. I am sympathetic to the fact that Turkey is doing everything it can to prevent the civil war in Syria from spilling over into its own country.

Thomas De Maiziere

#6. I sure am sick of the Civil War.

Flannery O'Connor

#7. I think that Barack Obama faces a level of divisiveness, and I don't mean on a national level in terms of the North and the South and the Civil War; I really mean just politically.

James Spader

#8. It's funny to see a film in Spain with a lot of violence because we don't have a lot of violence. Well, of course, we have violence, some murders, some terrorism and a lot of things. We have suffered a dictatorship, and we talk about the civil war constantly.

Javier Camara

#9. The Edmund Pettus Bridge - which in 2013 was declared a National Historic Landmark - isn't symbolic of the Civil War in a meaningful way. It is, however, the modern-day battlefield where the voting rights movement was born.

Douglas Brinkley

#10. Counting both Northerners and Southerners, more American lives were lost in the Civil War than in any other conflict.

Richard Shenkman

#11. If Lincoln is among history's truly great men, he didn't achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln's destiny.

Steve Erickson

#12. I'm Beginning To Wonder If It Would Have Been Best Had The South Won The Civil War.

Ted Nugent

#13. There is also the issue of personal privacy when it comes the executive power. Throughout our nation's history, whether it was habeas corpus during the Civil War, Alien and Sedition Acts in World War I, or Japanese internment camps in World War II, presidents have gone too far.

Dick Durbin

#14. Roosevelt was as much concerned to end the oppression of Jews as Lincoln was to end slavery during the Civil War; their priority in policy (whatever their personal compassion for victims of persecution) was not minority rights, but national power.

Howard Zinn

#15. The time was not yet ripe for the growth of mathematical science among us, and any development that might have taken place in that direction was rudely stopped by the civil war.

Simon Newcomb

#16. Going home means going back in time. It's not a trip you care to take alone, and anyway, isn't that the main reason to take a mate? So you have an ally in the civil war against your parents?

Diana Joseph

#17. At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies - cotton - was America's primary export.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#18. Americans in the Civil War period were very interested in Heaven and what it might be like, because they were having to face the fact that many of their loved ones were gone and many of their loved ones, they hoped, were in this other realm called Heaven.

Drew Gilpin Faust

#19. In a landscape littered with all of this imagery about the nobility of the Civil War and the Confederate effort and struggle, the absence of markers says something really powerful.

Bryan Stevenson

#20. America's 1st Arab spring came in the guise of the Civil War ... when our nation couldn't stomach the abomination of slavery anymore. One can't help keep wondering ... when the next one will come.

Timothy Pina

#21. Portland, Maine was the site of one of the northernmost battles of the Civil War.

Hank Bracker

#22. I don't feel the need to direct. I tried to get other people to direct Dances, but they wouldn't do it. They all thought it was too long. One director wanted to cut the Civil War sequence. Another thought the white woman was very cliched.

Kevin Costner

#23. If today is anything like the typical day of the past 3 years, three American soldiers will die in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Taliban will get a little stronger in Afghanistan and the civil war will continue to be enhanced in Iraq.

Alcee Hastings

#24. The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.

T. S. Eliot

#25. The Confederate flag was the flag of the American South during the civil war. It was the flag of people who were fighting against their own government in an attempt to retain slavery. It was the flag of people who thought slavery was no problem, who thought slavery was a good thing.

John Niven

#26. Sometimes we see the Civil War in movies and imagine these neatly aligned rows of men with muskets, walking in line to shoot each other. In reality the things that fascinated me were how absolutely ruthless and violent so many engagements were, how much suffering and how men were not prepared.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#27. One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone. There. Gone. No 'poof.' No flash of light. No explosion.

Michael Grant

#28. The three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic.

Daniel Mendelsohn

#29. The United States, per capita, at a certain period in its history, had the most junkies of any country ever in the world - right after the Civil War. The most brutal war, the greatest amount of casualties that America's ever had.

Al Lewis

#30. When I talk to entrepreneurs today, I feel like the grandfather who was in the Civil War.

Marc Andreessen

#31. Still, it's clear that there are lots of people out there who are uncomfortable [about racism]. The Civil War was a long time ago but there are aspects of it that remain unsettled,

Randy Newman

#32. The Civil War created in this country what had never existed before - a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union; it was the rebirth of the Union.

Woodrow Wilson

#33. The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina on the Florida coast. More than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2 percent of the population, died in it.

Bruce Catton

#34. Hair is also a problem. I remember once, when I was reporting from Beirut at the height of the civil war, someone wrote in to the BBC complaining about my appearance.

Kate Adie

#35. With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free.

Anthony Lewis

#36. The spectacle of the United States Army chasing the unarmed veterans, their wives, and their children out of the shadow of the Capitol was a scene of American urban combat without parallel since the Civil War.

Tim Weiner

#37. The middle of 'America's Women' is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency.

Gail Collins

#38. My family has served the country in almost every major war since the Civil War.

Jack Scalia

#39. I think that the firepower of the Civil War, the numbers of bodies that were left to rot, the numbers of amputations in the Civil War, all of this created threats to the understanding of the human being as an integral soul, as a body and soul that could be united.

Drew Gilpin Faust

#40. I think the ties to slavery and the terrible tragedy that followed the Civil War with Jim Crow and racial violence is closely linked to the Confederate flag.

William R. Ferris

#41. On the eve of the Civil War, James Parton could write that 'the political history of the United States, for the last thirty years, dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton's knocker.'

James Parton

#42. The majority of U.S. high school students don't know within 50 years when the Civil War occurred.

Jim Leach

#43. Something often neglected in popular accounts of the Wild West is the extent to which its dramas were colored by the politics and personal resentments left by the Civil War.

Gary Krist

#44. We will never know exactly how many women disguised themselves as men and fought in the Civil War. At the close of the hostilities, it was estimated that approximately 400 women had managed to enlist, but this number is almost certainly too low.

Jim Murphy

#45. The civil war in Rwanda and other ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives.

Michel Chossudovsky

#46. All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed. Because in addition to that feeling, that disintegration, there was rage. I wanted to break something.

Sebastian Faulks

#47. Apparently, it was common for children to participate in the Civil War, and thus, lots of fathers had brought their sons along for a fun family weekend of simulated violence and bloodshed.

Stuart Gibbs

#48. The Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, was put into effect on January 1, 1863, but news of the Proclamation and enforcement did not reach Texas until after the end of the Civil War almost two years later.

Corrine Brown

#49. I'm fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn't tell you that in New York. It'd mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis. Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet.

Ernest Hemingway,

#50. In the decade before the Civil War various north and south lines of railway were projected and some of these were assisted by grants of land from the Federal Government.

John Moody

#51. The evolution of national unity and equal rights is all about what America represents as a nation today: a manifestation of the historical episodes of Jefferson and Henry as well as the Civil War, the Women's Suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights struggles.

Patrick Mendis

#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. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. The only thing Abner Doubleday ever started was the Civil War.

Branch Rickey

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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,

#66. The Civil War ravaged the Southern states, while leaving the North untouched.

Eustace Mullins

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. I come from a stupid family. During the civil war my great uncle fought for the west.

Rodney Dangerfield

#75. 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

#76. I grew up 60 minutes way from Richmond, in Charlottesville, Virginia and, as a child, I was obsessed with the Civil War. I used to do re-enactments and all that stuff.

Billy Campbell

#77. I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

Anson Mount

#78. Havana is like Beirut, without having gone through the civil war to achieve the destruction.

Theodore Dalrymple

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.

Noam Chomsky

#87. The Civil War always moves me.

Suzanne Weyn

#88. 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

#89. But my point is these Civil War songs were gruesome. The hatred that's so bad in this country today, and for the past 10 or 15 years, bad as it is, is nothing compared to the kind of things people would write down and sing back in the Civil War.

T Bone Burnett

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. One of the things that most people aren't aware of when they think of the Civil War is the number of people and associated animals. (Armies) weren't mechanized. They had to rely on horses and mules.

Gary Miller

#98. One editor during the Civil War got a grievous message to meet his brothers corpse, only to find out that the telegraph operator had garbled the message to meet his living brother's CORPS.

Harold Holzer

#99. When we say the South lost the Civil War, we mean the white South. The blacks were liberated. And it's trying to redefine this Southern myth and bring it in a more positive direction.

William R. Ferris

#100. Mitchell rose to the task of playing the avenging angel for the Confederate States. There have been hundreds of novels about the Civil War, but Gone With the Wind stands like an obelisk in the

Margaret Mitchell