American History Quotes - Page 10

• Through American history, we have had populist movements that often, often, often have this ugly racial element. But, often, there are warning signs of some deeper social and economic problem.

  David Brooks

  Elements, Movement, Warning

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Common decency demands that [NCAA athletes] should be paid, but the only way it will happen is the same way workers got paid throughout American history, through a strong union.

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Strong, Athlete, Common Decency

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• Throughout American history, the political leaders have always exhorted the American people to be nice and quiet and leave things to them. But when very serious evils confronted the American people, they had to go beyond the Congressmen and Senators, and they had to commit civil disobedience and they had even to break the law.

  Howard Zinn

  Nice, Law, People

  Source: openvault.wgbh.org

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• I've always tried to write California history as American history. The paradox is that New England history is by definition national history, Mid-Atlantic history is national history. We're still suffering from that.

  Kevin Starr

  Writing, California, Suffering

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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• I think one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history was Donald Trump's immediate withdraw from TPP.

  Stephen K. Bannon

  Thinking, Pivotal Moments, Modern

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.

  George Packer

  Thinking, Would Be, Trump

  Source: www.npr.org

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• I've been there for so many crossroads in American history. My whole political life spans the birth of the environmental movement, the women's movement, the civil rights movement, putting an end to unjust wars, and so and so.

  Barbara Boxer

  War, Rights, Political

  Source: www.cosmopolitan.com

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• [Ronald Reagan] called the image of [George] Washington praying on his knees in Valley Forge "the most sublime image in American history."

  Paul Kengor

  Sublime, Valleys, Knees

  Source: www.visionandvalues.org

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• Obamacare's not imploding. The main goal of Obamacare was two-fold. One was to cover the uninsured, of which we've covered 20 million, the largest expansion in American history. The other was to fix broken insurance markets where insurers could deny people insurance just because they were sick or they had been sick. Those have been fixed, and for the vast majority of Americans, costs in those markets have come down, thanks to the subsidies made available under Obamacare.

  Jonathan Gruber

  Two, Obamacare, Broken

  Source: www.realclearpolitics.com

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• I have crossed over on the backs of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Madam C. J. Walker. Because of them I can now live the dream. I am the seed of the free, and I know it. I intend to bear great fruit.

  Oprah Winfrey

  Dream, History, African American

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• John Lane has long been recognized as one of the South's finest poets and memoirists. This debut establishes him as one of our finest novelists as well. His poet's eye for detail seamlessly merges with a born storyteller's gift for narrative. Fate Moreland's Widow gives voice to those who endured one of the most painful and neglected chapters in American history.

  Ron Rash

  Eye, Fate, Voice

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• Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

  Maya Angelou

  Book, Native American, Black History

  "Maya Angelou: 'Barack Obama has done a remarkable job'" by Hugh Muir, www.theguardian.com. February 15, 2012.

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• I don't think there's been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison.

  Bryan Stevenson

  Thinking, People, Prison

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• I can't understand why I flunked American history. When I was a kid there was so little of it.

  George Burns

  Funny, Humorous, Kids

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• History teaches us no race, no people, no nation has ever been freed through cowardice, through cringing, through bowing and scraping, but all that has been achieved to the glory of mankind, to the glory and honour of races and nations was through the manly determination and effort of those who lead and those who are led.

  Marcus Garvey

  Determination, Race, History

  Marcus Garvey (1983). “The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. II: August 1919-August 1920”, p.616, Univ of California Press

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• Ronald Reagan, and before him, Richard Nixon, and before Nixon, a slew of conservative politicians going back through American history, have played to the idea that the great majority of poor people are somehow "undeserving," and being undeserving, merit at best very limited, oftentimes deeply coercive and humiliating, government interventions to better their finances. That narrative isn't about to disappear overnight; but it strikes me as being like a weak gruel - there's no sustenance in it, no heft behind the argument.

  Sasha Abramsky

  People, Conservative, Argument

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The fact is that we wouldn't have found out about Manzanar except in our story-telling because it was really never told in the American history books when we attended school. So we were very, very lucky to have that part of history told.

  Tamlyn Tomita

  Book, School, Lucky

  Source: thecelebritycafe.com

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• When I look at American history and I look at what history means to me, I look at it as if it were a string of stories. And if it's told well enough and in a way that's charming and warm and with wit and humor, then it takes a bit of the edge off of it. You can still tell the truth, but if you tell it very sweetly and very warmly, it makes it go down a bit easier.

  Kadir Nelson

  Mean, Telling The Truth, Enough

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Lincoln is such an iconic figure in American history. He seems to reflect so many elements of American culture that we consider essential, whether it's the self-made man, the frontier hero, the politician who tries to act in a moral way as well as in a political way, Honest Abe. His career raises these questions that are still with us, the power of the federal government vis-à-vis the states, the question of race in American life, can we be a society of equals? There are so many issues central to Lincoln's career that are still part of our society one hundred and fifty years later.

  Eric Foner

  Hero, Men, Race

  "Eric Foner on the Perennial Relevance of Abraham Lincoln". Interview with Aaron Leonard, historynewsnetwork.org. October 4, 2010.

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• What happens from about 1954 to the late 1980s, is that we see a huge wave of optimism that school desegregation is going to be the way to improve educational outcomes for poor children of color. And we see a consensus build on the left and in the center that this is going to be a transformative education movement like none other we've seen in American history.

  Dana Goldstein

  Children, Educational, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• If you try to make interesting films, you're going to be disappointed most of the time. I choose just not to look at it that way. I don't look at American History X as a failure, or Fight Club as a failure, or 25th Hour as a failure, or Larry Flynt as a failure, or any of the movies that I care about that I've made that were not immediately successful. I'll stand with those movies any day over 90 percent of the movies that came out at the same time that made a hundred million dollars

  Edward Norton

  Successful, Fighting, Interesting

  Source: film.avclub.com

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• I mean you look back at American history and American culture, it's pretty striking. I mean this has been the safest country in the world forever, and the most frightened country in the world.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, Mean, Forever

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• If you've been preached to, if you've been educated, if you've been raised to believe that America is the most racist, the most disgustingly vile nation in the history of the world, and you are white, then you can inoculate yourself. You can immunize yourself from being associated with that aspect of American history because you are white, by becoming anti-American, anti-this and anti-that.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Believe, White, America

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• In a one-hour documentary, you can tell maybe ten stories. That's how the documentary is structured. I wrote to forty of the greatest historians of both African and African-American history, and hired them as consultants. I had them submit what they thought were the indispensable stories, the ones they felt this series absolutely had to include.

  Henry Louis Gates

  African American, Documentaries, Stories

  Source: pittsburghurbanmedia.com

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• My producers and I worked with these consultants and came up with seventy [stories] which we think are exemplary of the larger arc of African-American history between 1513 and 2013. We covered half a millennium, and it's amazing.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Thinking, African American, Stories

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