American history quotes

We Americans think, in every country in transition, there’s a Thomas Jefferson hiding behind some rock or a James Madison beyond one sand dune.

I was 22 when JFK was murdered, and I will never recover from it… Never.

We also can’t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That’s not leadership; that’s a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It’s the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq – and we should have learned it by now.

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.

Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I’m the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

Unions did in fact build the middle class. And here’s what that did. That built the United States of America as we know it.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

We Americans… bear the ark of liberties of the world.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.