Civil War Quotes - Page 36

• You must study to be frank with the world: frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say just what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted that you mean to do right.

  Robert E. Lee

  Children, Honesty, Mean

  John Esten Cooke, Robert E. Lee (2017). “General Robert E. Lee: The True Story of the Infamous “Marble Man”: The Life & Legacy of Robert E. Lee, Including & Personal Writings, Speeches and Orders”, p.42, Madison & Adams

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• They do not know what they say. If it came to a conflict of arms, the war will last at least four years. Northern politicians will not appreciate the determination and pluck of the South, and Southern politicians do not appreciate the numbers, resources, and patient perseverance of the North. Both sides forget that we are all Americans. I foresee that our country will pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation, perhaps, for our national sins.

  Robert E. Lee

  Country, Perseverance, Determination

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• You cannot be a true man until you learn to obey.

  Robert E. Lee

  Men, Confederate, True Man

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• I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that "it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams."

  Abraham Lincoln

  Country, Horse, Men

  Reply to Delegation from National Union League, 9 June 1864.

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• Duty is ours; consequences are God's.

  Stonewall Jackson

  God, Duty, Consequence

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• I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia [Sen. Robert C. Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan recruiter] that he would have been a great senator at any moment. . . . He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this nation.

  Christopher Dodd

  War, Thinking, Virginia

  "Dodd praise for Byrd hit by GOP". www.washingtontimes.com. April 8, 2004.

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• International correspondents with their long dictaphones, and dirty jeans, and five hundred words before whiskey, are slouched over the red velvet chairs, in the VIP section in the front, looking for the Story: the Most Macheteing Deathest, Most Treasury Corruptest, Most Entrail-Eating Civil Warest, Most Crocodile-Grinning Dictatorest, MOst Heart-Wrenching and Genociding Pulitzerest, Most Black Big-Eyed Oxfam Child Starvingest, Most Wild African Savages Having AIDS-Ridden Sexest with Genetically Mutilatedest Girls...The Most Authentic Real Black Africanest story they can find.

  Binyavanga Wainaina

  Girl, Children, Real

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• 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

  Money, War, Historical

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• Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who . . . even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.

  Susan Jacoby

  Religious, Atheist, War

  Susan Jacoby (2005). “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism”, p.70, Macmillan

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• From the beginning of our history the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned.

  Charles Sumner

  Country, Rights, Political

  Charles Sumner (1876). “The Works of Charles Sumner”

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• Let us strive on to finish the work we are in.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Motivational, Charity, Speech

  Second Inaugural Address, 4 Mar. 1865

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• Thrilling, illuminating, heart-pounding. Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy reads like a crackling espionage novel and resonates as only the most compelling history can. Abbott brings to vivid life four extraordinary and audacious women, and runs glorious roughshod over all our traditional notions of the role of women in the Civil War.

  Megan Abbott

  Running, Liars, War

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• Polarization affects families and groups of friends. Its a paralyzing situation. A civil war of opinion.

  Mick Jagger

  War, Groups, Opinion

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• Here, in the dread tribunal of last resort, valor contended against valor. Here brave men struggled and died for the right as God gave them to see the right.

  Adlai Stevenson I

  War, Men, Brave

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• It is notorious that, whenever the demand for labor is much greater than the supply, or the wages of labor are much higher than the expenses of living, very many, even on the ordinary laboring class, are remarkable for indolence, and work no more than compelled by necessity.

  Edmund Ruffin

  War, Class, Ordinary

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• The two systems slave and free-labor are incompatible. They have never permanently existed together in one country, and they never can.

  William H. Seward

  Country, War, Two

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• I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down but I bite my lip and keep quiet.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Hate, War, Lips

  Abraham Lincoln (2008). “The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln”, p.320, Wildside Press LLC

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• I have never in my life taken a command into battle and had the slightest desire to come out alive unless I won.

  Philip Sheridan

  War, Taken, History

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• Mother’s Day really was in its origin an antiwar day, an antiwar statement. Julia Ward Howe was sickened by what had happened during the Civil War, the loss of life, the carnage, and she created Mother’s Day as a call for women all over the world to come together and create ways of protesting war, of making a kind of alternate government that could finally do away with war as an acceptable way of solving conflict.

  Gloria Steinem

  Mother, War, Loss

  "Mother’s Day for Peace: A Dramatic Reading of Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation". "Democracy Now!" with Amy Goodman, www.democracynow.org. May 8, 2009.

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• When our mothers are alive and healthy, they do extraordinary things... like the mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who marched in Argentinean plazas, defying the military junta dictatorship and demanding the whereabouts of their abducted children... or the Liberian mothers who faced down civil war armed only with T-shirts and courage.

  Liya Kebede

  Mother, Children, Military

  "Let’s Make Mother’s Day a Global Reality" by Liya Kebede, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 7, 2009.

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• Civil wars leave nothing but tombs.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  War, Tombs

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• [On John Brown:] The poor wretch is hanged, but from his grave a root of bitterness will spring, the fruit of which at no distant day may be disunion and civil war.

  Fanny Kemble

  Spring, War, Roots

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• Christianity ... has produced the iniquities of the Inquisition, the egotism and celibacy of the monasteries, the fury of religious wars, the ferocity of the Hussite, of the Catholic, of the Puritan, of the Spaniard, of the Irish Orangeman and of the Irish Papist; it has divided families, alienated friends, lighted the torch of civil war, and borne the virgin and the greybeard to the burning pile, broken delicate limbs upon the wheel and wrung the souls and bodies of innocent creatures on the rack; all this it has done, and done in the name of God.

  Ouida

  Religious, War, Soul And Body

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• Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.

  Blaise Pascal

  War, Evil, Wish

  Blaise Pascal, Henry Rogers, Victor Cousin, Charles Louandre (1859). “The Thoughts, Letters and Opuscules of Blaise Pascal”, p.203

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• I have never seen an adequate description anywhere of the amazement, the uncomprehending horror of the bulk of the American people which preceded the firing of that gun at Sumter. Politicians or far-sighted leaders on both sides knew what was coming. And it is they who have written histories of the war. But to the easy-going millions, busied with their farms or shops, the onrushing disaster was as inexplicable as an earthquake. Their protest arose from sea to sea like the clamor of a gigantic hive of frightened bees.

  Rebecca Harding Davis

  War, Gun, Sea

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