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Civil War Quotes

We’ve collected the best Civil War Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Carolyn See, Anne Applebaum, John Seabrook, Geraldine Brooks, Douglas Brinkley. Use them as an inspiration.

1
Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.
Carolyn See
2
There’s no checklist of how democracies fail because they fail in different ways. Some of them fail because they break up and civil war breaks out… Often they fail because someone is elected to power who doesn’t respect the rules of the democracy.
3
By the time of the Civil War, there were many kinds of apples growing across the United States, but most of them didn’t taste very good, and as a rule, people didn’t eat them. Cider was cheaper to make than beer, and many settlers believed fermented drinks were safer than water. Everyone drank hard cider.
John Seabrook
4
Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733.
5
While the scars of the monstrous Civil War still remain, the wounds have closed since 1865, in large part, because of the civility of Grant and Lee.
6
By the end of 2001, between 100,000 to 150,000 Algerians had died in the civil war, as well as 120 foreigners. The cost to the economy ran into billions of dollars. And all this in spite of a tough, 120,000-strong army backed by 80,000 police.
7
Madras Cafe‘ is set against the backdrop of the civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1990s.
8
I lived in an atmosphere where Mama brought 60 Basque refugee children to England during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.
9
The idea of aerial military surveillance dates back to the Civil War, when both the Union and the Confederacy used hot-air balloons to spy on the other side, tracking troop movements and helping to direct artillery fire.
10
I jokingly say if there was one great thing about, you know, the Lebanese Civil War was that it forced me to read.
11
I was watching TV and saw people with masks, weapons, and grenades. I thought, Is that really possible? Could we be here yet again? And go into civil war one more time?
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.
13
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.
14
We have overcome some terrible blows to our democracy, to the future of our democracy, to the future of our nation. We survived the Civil War and the strife that tore this nation apart.
15
Some people cling to the belief that the Civil War was fought over states‘ rights. But history is not on their side. We cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery.
16
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.
17
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.’
18
If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There’s Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It’s pretty eclectic.
19
Women, who enjoyed a high social status and levels of education under Saddam, saw terrible setbacks as Iraq fell into civil war. As a result of the sectarian violence from 2005-2007, women retreated to their homes and fell from public view.
20
In 1884, for the first time since the Civil War, voters had elected a Democrat to the White House. Grover Cleveland promised to use the government to protect ordinary Americans, and to stop congressmen from catering to wealthy industrialists.
21
We are losing each day an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.
Iyad Allawi
22
Segregation was a burden for many blacks, because the end of the civil war and the amendments added to the constitution elevated expectations beyond reality in some respects.
Ed Smith
23
Once the troops move into Cambodia, the colleges and universities of this country were on the verge of civil war. Many closed down. The students were up in arms. And it looked very much like there were going to be real problems in this country.
William Kunstler
24
Prior to the Civil War, most libraries were either privately owned or housed in universities or churches.
25
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.
26
For believers, both privilege and privation are a trial, and both demand responses: one demands service, and the other demands patience. The greatest privilege is to live well in flourishing lands; the greatest privation is to live in the midst of war, especially civil war.
27
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.
28
I was born into Sudan‘s civil war, and before I could read or write, I was using an AK47 in the conflict between the Muslim north and Animist/Christian south over the land and natural resources.
Ger Duany
29
After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse.
Howard Fast
30
I’ve always been a Civil War buff. In fact, the ships that always fascinated me the most were the ironclads, because they were the start of an era.
31
There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.
John Negroponte
32
Nor should the U.S. military be forced to remain in Iraq essentially as an army for one side of a civil war.
33
The script was always the most important thing to me and I loved the script. For one thing, I’ve always admired trees. I just worship them. Think what trees have witnessed, what history, such as living through the Civil War, yet they still survive.
34
The Edmund Pettus Bridgewhich 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.
35
Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.
36
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
37
I like metal detecting, collecting Civil War artifacts, fishing, hunting, cigars, Labradors, the outdoor life, my baseball game, football.
38
After the Civil War, Black Mississippians had economic power, voting rights, and citizenship. They used their majority to elect African-Americans to office up and down the ballot.
39
The events of the Civil War are so odd, ferocious, and poignant that fictional characters do well simply to inhabit them.
40
I was born in the middle of Lebanon‘s civil war.
41
I actually have videos on my phone of me interviewing people and asking them what they thought of the new Spider-Man in ‘Civil War.’ They were like, ‘Oh he’s great. I love him,’ and then some people were like, ‘Nah, I don’t love him. he’s not great’ – and I was standing right in front of them!
42
I began to see during the civil war, in that part of the states of Missouri and Kansas where the doctors were shut out, the children did not die.
Andrew Taylor Still
43
Since before the Civil War, crosses have indeed garnished veterans‘ memorials from the North to the South, from Arlington to Normandy, and from the South Pacific to the Middle East.
44
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.
45
My generation started in big tournaments. ’88 Olympics, we got silver. ’89 European Championship, we got gold. 1990 World Cup in Argentina, we got gold. ’91 European Championship, we got gold, and then there was a civil war, and for three years, we didn’t play.
46
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.
47
I love general history. That’s all I read really. I don’t read novels, I read history. I love it. I live in an area that’s really rich in Civil War history. I live in Kentucky on a farm. A lot of revolution, a lot of military history I love.
48
I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to go to college in the United States. By the time I graduated, we had a full-blown civil war in both Liberia and Sierra Leone. I couldn’t go home.
49
And I’m a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That’s the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
Shelby Foote
50
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.
51
This union has been divided in like a civil war – brother against brother – sister against sister. And I’m pulling it together. We’ve already seen evidence of that in New York, in Pennsylvania, in California. The first thing is we have to get on the same page. We have to be united in one cause.
52
I just want people to question everything. Question what your congressman is doing, your city council. Question what really happened during the Civil War. What happened during 9/11.
53
I have prophesied for years that I was born for a Great War; that if I did not witness the coming of the Second American Civil War, I would begin it myself.
Augustus Sol Invictus
54
Just as much as the United States mattered to cotton, cotton mattered to the United States. Cotton reinvigorated slavery, established the young nation’s place in the global economy, and eventually helped create the political and economic conflicts that resulted in civil war.
55
‘Civil War’ was such a whirlwind, and I didn’t really know what was going on. I was thrown into the deep end.
56
There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history – military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what’s generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.
57
We went through tough times when I was very young and I’m so infinitely grateful to my parents. Their journey began during the civil war in Liberia and we came to Canada via Ghana. I’m in the happy situation where I can say I can enjoy every single day of my life.
58
We have no vital national interest in Syria’s civil war.
59
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
60
It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s that Congress got serious about the assignment laid out in the post-Civil War amendments.
61
When I was in my early twenties, I used to grow all sorts of very weird beards. All of them awful in retrospect. I had Civil War beards for a while, then Mennonite beards.
62
The second we started talking about doing the ‘Civil War’ storyline with Marvel, we brought up Spider-Man. Right away, Kevin Feige hinted to us there might be a possibility of them being able to work that out, and that’s all we needed – he was in the movie the second we heard that.
63
There’s a real question at stake now. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country?
64
When the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I was 15. I was shipped to boarding school in England and, after that, to UCLA.
65
It would be immoral to walk away from the consequences of our actions, leaving behind anarchy and civil war in Iraq.
66
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.
67
Our crisis of the house divided was a Christian civil war.
68
If the security forces continue to be dominated as they are now by political groups or sects, then the people won‘t trust in them – and the result will be civil war or fragmentation of the country.
Adnan Pachachi
69
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.
70
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.
71
Strangely enough, the legend of John Brown, who was clearly crazy, helped the abolitionist cause and is thought to have precipitated the American Civil War.
72
I do know that you have to choose between the logic of reconciliation and the logic of justice. Pure justice leads to new civil war. I prefer the negotiable revolution.
73
Well, Italy had been overrun by the War, there had practically been civil war, north and south of the Gothic Line, heavy bombing, the northern industrial cities had been bombed heavily and we had political disorder before 1948.
Gianni Agnelli
74
ISIS despises the Russian government for its support of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and so it’s no surprise that ISIS began targeting Russia in 2015, around the same time that Russia first intervened in the Syrian civil war.
75
I’d gone to Oxford to do graduate studies in the history of the slave trade, but I came across Georgiana’s letters, gave up that thesis, and wrote one on her instead. When I learned that Georgiana’s great-nephews supported opposite sides in the American Civil War, I knew this would be the perfect sequel.
76
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.
77
I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.
Anson Mount
78
Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don’t really understand its full significance.
79
I think every day we look at the mess of the chaos of the civil war in Iraq, I think every day people become more and more convinced that the war was a mistake. I think we have to learn from the mistakes of our past.
80
During the Civil War, the United States government had organized new territories in the West at a cracking pace, both to keep the Confederacy at bay and to bring the region‘s mines and farmland under government control.
81
Every great movie is about the people, even if it’s a great popular success like ‘Gone With the Wind.’ It’s really not about the Civil War. It’s about Scarlett and Rhett. That’s who you go to see. You’re not going to root for the North or pull for the South, or, you know, it’s the people you remember.
82
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
83
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.
84
The Civil War has a tremendous moral and emotional force.
85
Here’s the problem of the Democratic Party… There’s no Breitbart. The problem in the Democratic Party? They haven‘t had a civil war.
86
Magna Carta and the Civil War were about the power to tax.
87
Finland had a civil war less than 100 years ago, just like in Ireland. If you look at the history of newly independent nations, civil war is almost every time present, even in the United States.
88
From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.
89
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
90
The casualties in the Civil War amount to more than all other wars – all other American wars combined. More people died in that war than World War II, World War I, Vietnam, etc. And that was a war for white supremacy. It was a war to erect a state in which the basis of it was the enslavement of black people.
91
Doing something to make ourselves feel better is beside the real point of defeating Isis and ending the Syrian civil war.
92
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.
93
My grandfather was born in 1920. His grandfather was born in 1860, at the beginning of the Civil War, into an America where slavery had yet to be abolished. And so, as I have sometimes thought about it, I dodged slavery by just five generations.
94
If President Obama or any president ever attempts gun confiscation in America, there should be and will be a second civil war.
95
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.
96
There’s a definite rift in ‘Riverdale.’ There’s a civil war between the Southside and the Northside. And Jughead being on the Southside and Betty‘s on the Northside, it becomes a bit of a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ situation.
97
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.
98
For all those who experienced it, the Spanish Civil War was devastating.
99
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.
100
The cool thing is, I was a little nervous about how they were going to handle Black Panther in his own movie, but then when I saw ‘Civil War’ and just the perfect way they handled him in that movie, it made me even more excited about a Black Panther film.
101
My family has served the country in almost every major war since the Civil War.
Jack Scalia
102
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.
103
Occasionally, a re-enactment is a fine thing. I love Civil War re-enactments.
104
When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master‘s program and studied American literature.
105
It is important to understand how leaders have adapted and thought about war and warfare across their careers. ‘The Autobiography of General Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs of the Civil War’ is perhaps the best war memoir ever written.
106
It’s important to remember that the Jacobite Risings of the 18th century constituted a religious civil war, not a nationalistic movement.
107
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.
108
When I was a girl, civil war in Sudan forced me to flee my home town of Wau.
109
Journalists were at the forefront. From the Civil War until the early 1900s, nothing was being done to solve the problems of the Industrial Age.
110
Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.
111
It’s just too late to ban all guns. There are 300 million. We should’ve done that after the Civil War – that’s when we should’ve taken away guns and defined what militias were. But we didn’t do it then, and we can’t now.
112
There was so much going on in 1936 with the height of the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War and Germany on the move and all of those things. There was a tension in the air.
113
Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.
Irving Thalberg
114
When Ukrainians kill Ukrainians, I believe this is as close to a civil war as you can get.
115
There is a risk that overt American support for Guaido could shore up Maduro’s base and trigger displays of military force, potentially plunging Venezuela into a civil war.
116
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.
117
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
118
President Abraham Lincoln never lost his ardor for the United States to remain united during the Civil War.
119
There were three causes that accounted for the proclamation of martial law in Poland. First it was the progressing economic ruin of the country. Second, it was the decomposition of the functioning of the state. And third, a threat of a civil war.
Wojciech Jaruzelski
120
With all due respect to re-enactors, I consider the Civil War too tragic a subject to make a game of.
121
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.
122
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
123
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.
124
I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch’s Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War.
125
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.
126
I think you can go back in history and look at what the effect in Asia and the world was of a divided, fractured China from, you know, the opium wars through the Chinese civil war, and I don’t think it was pretty for Asia or the world.
127
At the time of the Civil War, there were six democracies in the face of the planet. Today, there’s 120 and they’ve been inspired by the American exceptionalism.
128
In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war.
129
I’ve been getting interested in reimagining folk songs and writing songs that should have existed but didn’t, particularly around the Civil War when black voices were muted and only allowed particular channels.
130
I can’t discuss the possibility of the U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war without also talking about Benghazi.
131
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.
132
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.
133
We are a resilient country. We’ve been through a Civil War; we’ve been through two World Wars. We’ve been through a Great Depression; we even made it through Jimmy Carter! We will make it through the Obama years!
134
I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years. And I was growing up in school, and the federal government didn’t want us taught about the history of the war, because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels.
135
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
136
In many ways, the North won the Civil War militarily and then lost the peace. You know, a group of writers, included many Confederate generals, began a school of thought called the Lost Cause in which they began to romanticize the Confederacy.
137
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
138
I’m not an apologist for Iran‘s actions. Iran certainly has supported activities of terrorism, and the Houthis don’t have clean hands. The Houthis have engaged in crimes too. But the idea that that justifies American involvement in a civil war in Yemen doesn’t make any sense strategically.
139
Throughout U.S. history, national crises have been used to suspend constitutional protections and attack basic rights. After the Civil War, with the nation in crisis, the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves was promptly betrayed.
140
The understanding of Syria’s devastating civil war has been distorted by the immense danger and difficulty of covering it.
141
From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.
142
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
143
I left my home, and it was the most beautiful country in the world in my eyes, and I was always happy in the summertime to go back. And then suddenly, the civil war starts, and you just worry first about your family and friends, and then an entire nation.
144
Despite what the pundits want us to think, contested primaries aren’t civil war, they are democracy at work, and that’s beautiful.
145
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn’t every war fought between men, between brothers?
146
Some of my earliest political feelings were based on the anti-Japanese bubblegum cards I got. There were also Spanish Civil War bubblegum cards. Awful.
147
I once left my wife and child in a hotel in Mexico to fly to Guatemala in this tiny plane for two days to see the rainforests. Guatemala had just finished a civil war and my hotel door had five or six bolts on it; I was locking myself into a safe vault.
148
The civil war across the Middle East between the Shia and the Sunni empowers groups like ISIS and al Qaeda who claim to be the defenders of Sunni rights against Shia attack.
149
For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary.
150
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.
151
Many say that a man comes along with the moral courage of Nelson Mandela once in a lifetime. He was an extraordinary man who paid a great sacrifice for his beliefs, then led a nation from the prospect of civil war to reconciliation.
152
As for Vietnam, what matters is that Kennedy successfully resisted pressure to send anything more than military advisers, a stance that was a likely prelude to complete withdrawal from the conflict. There is solid evidence of his eagerness to end America’s military role in that country’s civil war.
153
Abraham Lincoln is singular. Abraham Lincoln, before he was killed, stood up and, you know, for the first time from any sitting president, stood for the right for suffrage for African-American men who had served in the Civil War. And that’s a limited suffrage, but it was quite radical at the time.
154
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
155
The day that the balance between the two sections of the country – the slaveholding States and the non-slaveholding States – is destroyed is a day that will not be far removed from political revolution, anarchy, civil war, and widespread disaster.
156
People who teach American history survey classes have a lot of ground to cover and tend to focus on landmarks. You get through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and you have to get to the beginning of the 20th century fast. It’s pretty easy to go lightly on the Gilded Age.
157
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.
158
I’m a living testament to the value of immigration. I escaped a civil war, and I came to Canada as a refugee, and they gave my family protection. I did my best to pay that country back, and I think I did that.
159
When the blood of thousands of Americans is shed, the impact lingers. For a generation after the Civil War, the Republican injunction to ‘vote as you shotkept the party dominant for decades; from 1868 to 1912, only one Democrat – Grover Cleveland – won the White House.
160
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.
161
I believe we should utilise any power we have for important issues that are bigger and beyond us. Whether it’s with refugees or working to educate kids. I don’t think you need to have gone through a civil war to do something. I believe as human beings, we can look out for each other.
162
Once we destroyed the Saddam regime, we knew there was going to be a civil war.
163
Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents’ then-illegal and interracial marriage.
164
Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war.
165
I wrote my first script, which was 50 pages, at age 15. It was about two brothers in love with the same nurse while they’re convalescing in a Civil War hospital.
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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.
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For the average person, 98 percent of those who fought in the Civil War, they did not own slaves. They were simply answering the call, and in this case many, many young men – 17, 18 years old – coming in to defend what they saw as a federal invasion of Virginia, and they fought honorably.
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People like to make fun of the fans who camp out but people have renaissance fairs; people do Civil War re-enactments; people do what they like. I’m tired of hearing people rage on the fans. If you don’t like ‘Twilight,’ don’t buy a ticket.
169
Civil war is a national crisis and also a private trauma: We suffer it collectively and in isolation.
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In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I’s Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.
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The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it’s pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.