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U S History Quotes

Browse 41 quotes about U S History.

U S History Quotes

“On some level, if not intellectual then animal, there has always been an understanding of the power of women's anger:that as an oppressed majority in the United States, women have long had within them the potential to rise up in fury, to take over a country in which they've never really been offered their fair or representative stake. Perhaps the reason that women's anger is so broadly denigrated--treated as so ugly, so alienating, and so irrational--is because we have known all along that with it came the explosive power to upturn the very systems that have sought to contain it. What becomes clear, when we look to the past with an eye to the future, is that the discouragement of women's anger--via silencing, erasure, and repression--stems from the correct understanding of those in power that in the fury of women lies the power to change the world.”

PoliticsFeminismWomen S HistoryU S History
Book:Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger
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“A rising sun died in America and the world on Nov. 22, 1963. Some say that we have never again seen such a rising sun in the sky as we did that morning. Even if it was cloudy or raining that day, the country and world were more innocent and optimistic at that moment than they have been since then. Some say that a piece of all of us – the hope that helps us get through another day - died that day. Others say the act just opened the eyes of many about what the U.S. government and other governments had done in our names for a long time.”

American PoliticsU S HistoryJfkJohn F KennedyJfk AssassinationJfk ConspiracyAmerican PresidentsPolitical Assassinations
Book:Death of the Rising Sun: A Search for Truth in the JFK Assassination
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“As an inhabitant of a Mississippi River town happily shouts out in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “You pays your money and you makes your choice!” That may be the most American sentence ever written.”

American HistoryAmericansU S HistoryClassicism
Book:First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
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“Especially appealing to the planter elite was the conservatism of the American Revolution. Indeed, according to their reading, it had been so conservative that it hardly deserved the title of revolution at all. The goal had been simple political independence, and the issue of home rule had not expanded to include the dangerous question of who should rule at home. The men who made the revolution had maintained control in victory.”

SlaverySouthU S HistoryU S PoliticsAmerican Conservatism
Book:Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction
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“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

United StatesMilitary Industrial ComplexU S History
Author:Eisenhower
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“A third layer of nativeness was composed of those whom others thought directly descended, even the tiniest fraction of their genes, from the human beings who had been brought from Africa centuries ago as slaves. While this layer of nativeness was not vast in proportion of the rest, it had vast importance, for society had been shaped in reaction to it. An unspeakable violence had occurred in relation to it, and yet it endured, fertile, a stratum of soil that perhaps made possible all future transplanted soils.”

SlaveryImmigrationImmigrantsUs HistoryAncestorsSlavesHistory Repeating ItselfU S HistoryNatives
Book:Exit West
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“Not only is Donald Trump the most despised candidate ever, but many of the people who have made the most scathingly censorious criticisms of him are members of his own party. This is absolutely unprecedented in our history, and it ought to give pause to all Americans, particularly supporters of Donald Trump.”

CriticismAmerican HistoryRepublican PartyAmericansDonald TrumpU S HistoryRepublican Party United StatesU S A
Book:What Donald Trump Supporters Need to Know: But Are Too Infatuated to Figure Out
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“The old refrain is that there are no atheists in foxholes. That's nonsense. They are there by the millions. There is little in combat that will lead one to look upon the Creator with favor. What can't be there, instead, is the individualist, the selfish, the self-consumed, the self-centered, the aloof loner. Such a man cannot long survive. The terror of combat cannot be described by fear of death. There are worse things. The world can suddenly become a very cold place...He needs warmth, a fire, to survive: His discipline, his training, his duty, honor and country, his family, and ultimately the very oak of his manhood are thrown into the blaze, but they are not enough to save him. At the end, he needs the warmth of his comrades. Otherwise, all he will have with which to face the cold dark will be his own spent soul.”

WarMilitaryVietnamManhoodVietnam WarU S History
Book:The Crouching Beast: A United States Army Lieutenant's Account of the Battle for Hamburger Hill, May 1969
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“Planters clung to their proslavery beliefs even when there were facts to the contrary because the stakes involved in abandoning them were too high. They could not reject or even compromise their central myths, for to do so would mean condemning a whole culture as a lie...Ideologies, once constructed, have lives of their own. Any evidence which might have contradicted the planters' basic beliefs faced an a priori denial.”

SlaveryAfrican AmericanCivil WarU S History
Book:Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction
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“Experts have called Donald Trump's ignorance "breathtaking." Jeffrey Goldberg has said that Trump has "no understanding of the post-war international order that was created by the United States." Goldberg further stated that Trump shows "little interest in understanding why the world is organized the way it is.”

IgnoranceWorld HistoryDonald TrumpU S History20th Century HistoryJeffrey Goldberg
Book:What Donald Trump Supporters Need to Know: But Are Too Infatuated to Figure Out
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“In my quest to find Green Cottenham, I also discovered an unsettling truth that when white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our "fault". But it is undeniably our inheritance.”

RaceRace And Racism In AmericaU S History
Author:Douglas A. Blackmon
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“All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollection of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”

Human RightsU S History
Author:Thomas Jefferson
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“Whose voice was first sounded on this land? The voice of the red people who had but bows and arrows. [...] What has been done in my country I did not want, did not ask for it; white people going through my country. [...] When the white man comes in my country he leaves a trail of blood behind him. [...] I have two mountains in that country--the Black Hills and the Big Horn Mountain. I want the Great Father to make no roads through them.”

HistoryGenocideUs HistoryAboriginalFirst NationsU S HistoryNativesAboriginalsFirst PeopleNative People
Author:Red Cloud
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“If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace. But that which you now say we must live on is too small. The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was the best. Had we kept that, we might have done the things you ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die.”

NativeGenocideUs HistoryAboriginalNative AmericansFirst NationsU S HistoryNativesAboriginalsFirst People
Author:Ten Bears Comanche Nation
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“American influence in Latin America has been at the disposal of whoever has wished to destroy the heritage of Spain and Portugal (whose daughter Brazil became an independent Empire under a Portuguese Prince in 1822). It has been a long hard struggle, with American-backed forces generally triumphing in the end. But the endurance of the Catholic Iberian tradition may be seen by the fact that the battle is not over yet.”

CatholicCatholicismU S HistoryCatholic History
Book:Puritan's Empire
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“One story that circulated about (U.S. Minister to Russia Charles S.) Todd concerned his conversation with a lady-in-waiting at an Imperial reception in the Winter Palace. In his bad French with a Kentucky accent, he mispronounced the word for year, so that an explanation of his travels came out: "I was an ass in Paris, part of an ass in London, almost an ass in Germany, and I am two asses here." To which the lady reportedly responded, "And you will be an ass wherever you go.”

RussiaDiplomacyU S History
Book:Distant Friends: The United States and Russia, 1763-1867
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“You have driven me from the East to this place, and I have been here two thousand years or more. [...] My friends, if you took me away from this land it would be very hard for me. I wish to die in this land, I wish to be an old man here. [...] I have not wished to give even a part of it to the Great Father [the President]. Though he were to give me a million dollars I would not give him this land. [...] When people want to slaughter cattle they drive them along until they get them to a corral, and then they slaughter them. So it was with us. [...] My children have been exterminated; my brother has been killed.”

GenocideUs HistoryNative AmericansFirst NationsU S HistoryNativesAboriginalsFirst PeoplesPoncas
Author:Standing Bear
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“The white men in the East are like birds. They are hatching out their eggs every year, and there is not room enough in the East and they must go elsewhere; and they come west, as you have seen them coming for the last few years. And they are still coming, and will come until they overrun all of this country; and you can't prevent it. [...] Everything is decided in Washington by the majority, and these people come out west and see that the Indians have a big body of land they are not using, and they say we want the land.”

GenocideUs HistoryNative AmericansFirst NationsU S HistoryNativesAboriginalsFirst Peoples
Author:George Crook
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“Photos have emerged establishing that David William Ferrie had been in the same Civil Air Patrol unit as Lee Harvey Oswald and apparently Ferrie had met with Oswald during the summer of 1963. Ferrie was extremely against the Communistic philosophy. He was a member of the anti-Castro Cuban Revolutionary group, and was dubbed the master of intrigue. Once when he gave an anti-Kennedy speech to an American veterans’ group in New Orleans regarding the Bay of Pigs Invasion, his rant against the President was so belligerent that he was asked to leave the podium. On February 22, 1967, Ferrie mysteriously died of a stroke. The strange part concerning his death was that he left behind two suicide notes and then died of natural causes. In the days preceding his death, he had told friends that he was a dead man. Ferrie was only one of many who were somehow connected to Kennedy’s death and who later died in a mysterious way.”

Sea StoriesU S HistoryKennedy Assassination
Author:Captain Hank Bracker, "The Exciting Story of Cuba"
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“A theory held that an anti-Castro group was behind the assassination…. Sylvia Orenstein, who was born in New York City on 22nd July, 1921, promoted this theory while taking evening classes at Brooklyn College. The marriage to her professor, James Meagher, accounted for her name change. As Sylvia Meagher, she became a research analyst at the UN’s World Health Organization. Her book, “Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities, and the Report After the Fact,” published in 1967, supported this widely held theory. In her book, she expressed that she was not convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a lone gunman. Her conclusion was that the Warren Commission had attempted to cover-up important details of the actual people behind the assassination. In 1980, Meagher co-authored another book named “Master Index to the John F. Kennedy Assassination Investigations.” Meagher continued to believe that John F. Kennedy had been killed by Anti-Castro exiles until her death at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City, at the age of 67, on January 14, 1989.”

U S HistoryKennedy AssassinationConspiricy Theories
Author:Captain Hank Bracker, "The Exciting Story of Cuba"
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“It was indeed the transcendent force of modernization that accounts for the unparalleled strength of Know-Nothingism in Massachusetts. The political fallout from the pressures of modernization, however, included more than the backlash of the native-born majority against immigrants, Catholics, and the South that most historians perceive as the essence of Know-Nothingism. Explosive urban and industrial growth had thrust the Commonwealth into the forefront of the industrial states in the antebellum period, creating, in the process, wrenching social and economic dislocations. The failure of the established parties to mount a significant response to the myriad issues and problems spawned in the matrix of modernization weakened partisan attachments and set the rank and file of the established parties on a quest for a political vehicle that would make a difference in their lives. In 1854, such a vehicle materialized in the form of an antiparty, antipolitician populist movement that promised to cleanse the statehouse of corrupt old parties and self-serving political careerists and turn the government over to the people so that they might right the wrongs that had for so long afflicted them. Among the afflictions, it is true, were the many social problems associated with mass immigration; but there were other troubling and pervasive concerns endemic to an unharnessed, rapidly expanding urban, industrial order, including the tyrannical factory system, the decline in the status of labor, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the deteriorating quality of urban life.”

History Repeating ItselfU S History
Book:The Know-Nothing Party In Massachusetts: The Rise And Fall Of A People's Movement
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“We have been south and suffered a great deal down there. Many have died of diseases which we have no name for. Our hearts looked and longed for this country where we were born. There are only a few of us left, and we only wanted a little ground, where we could live. We left our lodges standing, and ran away in the night. The troops followed us. I rode out and told the troops we did not want to fight; we only wanted to go north, and if they would let us alone we would kill no one. The only reply we got was a volley. After that we had to fight our way, but we killed none who did not fire at us first. My brother, Dull Knife, took one-half of the band and surrendered near Fort Robinson. [...] They gave up their guns, and then the whites killed them all.”

GenocideUs HistoryNative AmericansFirst NationsU S HistoryNativesAboriginalsFirst PeoplesCheyennes
Author:Little Wolf
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“FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Once upon a time our politicians did not tend to apologize for our country’s prior actions! Here’s a refresher on how some of our former patriots handled negative comments about our great country. These are quite good JFK’S Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 60’s when De Gaulle decided to pull out of NATO. De Gaulle said he wanted all US military out of France as soon as possible. Rusk’s response: “Does that include those who are buried here?” De Gaulle did not respond. You could have heard a pin drop. When in England, at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of ‘empire building’ by George Bush. He answered by saying, “Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.” You could have heard a pin drop. There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American. During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room saying, “Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intend to do, bomb them?” A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: “Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?” You could have heard a pin drop. A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S., English, Canadian, Germany and France. At morning tea the Frenchman complained that the conference should be conducted in French since it was being held in Paris. The German replied that, so far as he could see, the reason that it was being held in English was as a mark of respect to the other attendees, since their troops had shed so much blood so that the Frenchman wouldn’t be speaking German.”

U S HistoryConferenceYou Could Hear A Pin Drop
Author:marshall sorgen
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“But if arming Iran to support Israel was insane, the flip side of the policy, in the long run at least, was truly demented: Weinberger and Shultz favored defending Saudi Arabia and the enormous U.S. oil interests there by secretly bolstering the brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. As a result of their efforts, billions of dollars in aid and weapons were funneled to Saddam's regime.”

IraqIranPolitics Of The United StatesU S HistorySaddam HusseinEspionage CultureOil WarsPresident Regan
Book:House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
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