Top 151 American History Quotes

Here in Britain, we can get a little bit snobby about American history. Yes, their history is not quite as long as ours. But it isn’t all that short, either.

I like American history.

African American history is really American history because African Americans really helped build this country.

If I wasn’t serving in Congress, I’ve always wanted to be a high school teacher. Specifically, I want to teach a course on modern American history and use Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury as a primary text.

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.

Trump is an icon. He is a part of American history. He is every bit the icon as anyone I paint.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

As we look back over the sweep of American history, it has been the American Presidency that has best fulfilled the vision of the Founders. It has brought to our Republic a dynamism and effectiveness that other democracies have lacked.

It is not, nor will it ever be, white people’s responsibility to teach black children our unique American history.

The countless number of influential figures in American history who are of Caribbean heritage indicates the need to set aside a designated time to celebrate their contribution to our country.

There is no 20-year period in American history when stocks lost money.

Unlike any other leader in modern American history, we are led today by a president that has decided to pit Americans against each other.

In my opinion, assassination theories will continue to revolve around these assassinations as they have around several other significant assassinations in American history. The assassination of President Lincoln comes to mind.

Schools don’t teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history.

The truth is, I love history and studied it in college, with a particular focus on early American history. My love is so deep, in fact, I went to school at The College of William & Mary in Colonial Williamsburg.

If you look throughout American history, it has been protests and mass movements and the people rising up that has moved to this country forward.

The men and women who occupied the east coast of North America between 1607 and 1800 have been more closely scrutinized than any other collection of people in American history.

In both British and American history, fervent imperialism has always coexisted with bouts of fierce isolationism.

It’s disappointing that President Obama – who ran for office in 2008 saying he was going to be a fiscally responsible president – has caused the largest deficits and the largest debt in American history.

I’m so proud of myself. I thought, ‘I’ve got to learn about American history.’ I literally took two months off and watched every documentary known to man. I really didn’t know Benjamin Franklin was so cool.

‘The Hatfields and McCoys’ is a classic tale of American history. These are names that are widely recognized, yet few people know the real story that made them famous.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it.

When my French side thinks of ‘bohemian,’ it imagines Montparnasse authors and absinthe – that kind of aesthetic. The American definition might be more tied to American history and culture.

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

I started drumming around the same time I came across this part of American history. But there seemed to be a way forward playing drums. There didn’t seem to be a way forward being fascinated by a piece of history.

There can be no argument about the Lone Star State’s significant contributions to American history, and we must remember the actions and the sacrifices of those who made Texas independence a reality.

The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it’s Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the expansion of women’s rights or, now, gay rights, I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.

I was reading newspaper front pages from the 1930s, and I was taken aback. I’m not naive about American history, but I was a bit knocked off my feet by things that used to be on the front pages of newspapers.

There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq by U.S. and coalition partners stands as one of the greatest blunders in American history. The Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, rose out of the the chaos, throwing the region into turmoil that hasn’t been equaled since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.

The largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983.

American history has always had elements of what we now think of as Trumpism – Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Father Coughlin. It’s not as if these things haven’t always existed, and they were powerful. The big difference is Trump is president.

There’s so much in American history that has been hidden and shunned.

Codifying discrimination in our laws should be something we read about in American history, not on the front pages of today’s American newspapers and magazines.

I didn’t mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I’d rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.

I don’t concentrate on any one period of history; I like to locate my stories in wildly different eras and places. I seem to be drawn to large, sprawling, uncomfortable swaths of American history, finding embedded within them a tight narrative that involves strife, heroism, and survival under difficult circumstances.

I’m a history buff, so I’ve been reading lots of books on Irish and American history.

I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.

I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal.

There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.

We now enter a new age of American history, and the question to be answered is this: Will we restore the republic our forefathers created, or will we allow it to be annihilated by those who hate America, its history, and all it stands for?

If we hit the debt ceiling, that’s… essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history. The impact on the economy would be catastrophic.

The Freedom Flag is a powerful, physical reminder of one of the darkest days in American history.

I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.

Tony Kaye is great with that kind of stuff. Up until American History X, he had only done commercials.

When I first served as Attorney General back in the early 90s, crime was at its highest in American history, with its peak in 1992.

This is the worst President ever. He George W. Bush is the worst President in all of American history.

The Fed’s organization reflects a long-standing desire in American history to ensure that power over our nation’s monetary policy and financial system is not concentrated in a few hands, whether in Washington or in high finance or in any single group or constituency.

Boycotts have been a critical part of social justice in American history, particularly for African-Americans.

From tea parties to the election in Massachusetts, we are witnessing the single greatest political pushback in American history.

Americans don’t learn about the world; they don’t study world history, other than American history in a very one-sided fashion, and they don’t study geography.

Political vitriol is a familiar enough characteristic of American history.

We wonder if we will be the first generation in American history to leave our children with fewer opportunities and a less prosperous nation than the one we inherited.

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.

I learned a lot about American history though jazz, and that’s why I loved American history when I was in high school. I could hear different stories – the story that they would tell in school, and then the story that I would hear in the music.

George H.W. Bush had perhaps the greatest resume in American history. Director of the CIA, ambassador to the U.N., envoy to China, vice president of the United States and then, of course, president. It’s staggering to contemplate one person achieving so much.

Throughout American history many of our social gains and much of our progress toward democracy were made possible by the active intervention of the federal government.

I think that America is a nation of faith. I do believe that. Certainly by way of heritage – there’s a powerful Christian thread through all of American history.

If Mitt Romney defeats President Obama in his bid for reelection on Tuesday, it will mark the success of one of the most deeply cynical political campaigns in American history. It is hard to beat an incumbent no matter the economic climate.

Republicans stalled Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court because they could, and 136 years of American history recommended it as politically advantageous.

Daddy loved our country, he loved our history. He was always talking about American history and telling us stories from American history, and loved our most treasured values of freedom, democracy, justice.

Any reasonable person looking at the policy results… the substance… the facts would agree that the Trump presidency is one of the most successful in American history.

As one of the national organizers of the Women’s March back in 2017, immediately after the Women’s March, over 20,000 women across the country had registered to run for office – the largest numbers we’ve seen in probably our entire American history for women to run in this way.

Once you choose to run for president of the United States and succeed, your earlier life, your biography, is a major part of American history.

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of American history knows that unchecked spying undermines democracy and public trust.

The conservative interpretation of American history says that wherever the word ‘God’ appears, it’s obviously our God, it’s obviously a Christian God; it’s usually an evangelical God. The simplest point I’m making is: That is just absolutely not true.

In time, foods such as hamburgers and ice cream became more than just meals. They became part of American history and culture, touchstones that are almost immediately nostalgic and sentimental no matter how old you are or what part of the country you are from.

The Great Migration changed American history not just for the migrants but for all of us. It made possible American cultural milestones like the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago blues, and Motown, just to name a few.

I sang ‘American Pie’ a lot in my stage set. It had a knack of uniting an audience in a sing-along. It’s a clever song about American history but wrapped in a fantastic tune.

Any of the social changes in American history are because people thought there was injustice. We have to show that this corporate welfare and cronyism is unjust – and that it’s not only rigging the system so people get wealthy who don’t deserve to get wealthy.

African-American history is American history.

The school curriculum today, particularly American history, is a shame.

It was OK for the media to pursue Former President Clinton year after year for lying about a private, consensual sexual affair, but we have five justices who committed one of the biggest crimes in American History, and it ceased to be a big story.

I’ve been writing American history for a long time, and I’ve had a hard time finding strong, interesting female characters. There are women, of course, in American history, but they’re hard to write about because they don’t leave much of a historical trace, and they’re not usually involved in high-profile public events.

Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.

Politics is not something most people have to do every day. Their daily lives are much more influenced by job opportunities, whether the country is in a recession or a boom period. If you really want to understand what drives American history, look at the economic… side.

Black history is American history. You cannot tell one story without telling the other.

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history.

There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn’t exist.

I’ve always had sort of an interest in American history, full stop, and especially people who contributed to the civil rights struggle.

American history and the black experience are inextricable. And both are inextricable from policing. Far more often than not, that’s been a good thing.

During the Civil War, the fledgling Republican Party constructed the nation’s first activist government, using taxes to fund social welfare legislation for the first time in American history.

If you are attempting to study American history, and you don’t understand the force of white supremacy, you fundamentally misunderstand America.

In ‘Pox: An American History,’ Michael Willrich meticulously traces the story of how the smallpox vaccine was pressed into service during a major outbreak.

Those that clamor loudest for Columbus to be erased from the pages of American history do so far more because of their hatred for America than their love of the Indians.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump pledged to eliminate our national debt ‘over a period of eight years.’ Now two years into his administration, our national debt has increased, surpassing $21 trillion for the first time in American history.

If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s.

American history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation.

Personally, I can’t see the appeal in trekking down to D.C. for a networking extravaganza, even if it is built around a special moment in American history. While I find the election of Barack Obama inspirational, I don’t have a desire to memorialize it with overly effusive celebration.

When a government forcibly holds enough people indefinitely without trial, it evokes the kinds of raids, detention, and abuses of power associated with authoritarian states – or darker periods in American history.

Our American history reflects a long-standing tension between people and power. In fact, all government everywhere does. But our American form of government solved the problem, better than most, of moderating this tension between people and power.

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

The Declaration of Independence is a sacred part of American history.

RuPaul might not broadcast herself as political, but I think she tries to make moves in American history by catching more flies with honey than vinegar. Rather than telling people to vote, maybe she’ll do a mini-challenge on voting. She understands that you can influence people in a good way without preaching.

In American history, it’s about hard work and self-reliance. It’s not about collecting giveaways or being on unemployment forever. That the economy moves ahead for people who are going to work to realize the American dream, own a home, send your kids to college. I think it’s the founding cornerstone of America.

Through educational programming, Jewish American History Month will help raise the awareness of a people, their history and contributions. It will help combat anti-Semitism, a phenomenon that is on the rise and that unfortunately still exists in our Nation.

Cotton Mather is one of those classic figures of American history who can’t be left out. One has to explain him or explain him away, redeem him or denounce him.

As president, I would promote a Fair and Flat Tax plan, known as the ‘EZ Tax.’ My tax plan would be the largest tax cut in American history, reforming individual, business, and worker taxes.

Black history is American history.

As the most radical agenda in American history comes through the 117th Congress, the Whip Team will play an important role in making sure House Republicans keep a united front in advocating for conservative policies and principles.

The book ‘A Reliable Wife’ is a slice of American history. It takes a part of American history and tells a story about the purchase of a wife by a Wisconsin businessman. The research of that would have been really interesting.

We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation’s greatness.

I like stories in specific time periods. ‘The Revenant’s’ era of American history was fascinating because it was this lawless no-man’s land. It defined the idea of the American frontiersman as man conquering nature. In a way, the story of Hugh Glass is about man dominating nature.

Bill Clinton beat Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, for the White House in 1992 by focusing on ‘the economy, stupid’ – and Clinton’s victory led, in time, to the longest sustained boom in American history.

I’m covering the worst president in American history.

My interest in writing about American history stemmed originally, I think, from a subconscious desire to find roots – I felt like a girl without a country. I have put down roots quite firmly by now, but in the process, I have discovered the joys of research and am probably hooked.

There are few instances when American history offers us two clear sides of a moral line.

Conflict with the United States is one of the overwhelming facts of Latin American history.

Richard Nixon had a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy life. He was a man with a grandiose thoughts: dreams of not simply being president but maybe becoming one of the truly great presidents of American history.

The Middle Way included the largest public works project in American history: the Interstate Highway system, which updated American roads for a driving generation with leisure time on their hands, but expanded the federal government’s purview.

Some IMDB viewers complain that ‘Beloved’ should have been reclassifed as Horror… well, so should American history.

Bottom line – American history tells us that where there is a will, there will always be a way to achieve quick and fast inclusion.

I’ve always been interested in the Depression as this very dramatic pivotal period in American history.

I knew nothing of American History because I didn’t pay attention to American History in school. Because I did not see myself in American History in school.

A trillion dollars spent, 2,000 American lives lost – Afghanistan is the longest war in American history. But you don’t hear a word about it.

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.

We tend in this country to talk about Democrats and Republicans, and think there’s little group over there called Independents that’s maybe 2%. That is not the case, and it has not been the case for most of modern American history.

By looking into more details of American history, we can make more sense of what’s happening today.

Look at the American history of slavery. Can you say that hundreds of years later that has been eased? That pain has not yet been eased.

We have far more options for black Americans to tell stories outside of slavery, but whenever it comes to slavery, it’s an uncomfortable subject. Why? Because it’s the most unresolved subject in American history.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are the most investigated couple in American history – now the most thoroughly exonerated couple in American history.

Tiger Woods experienced perhaps the greatest fall from grace of any celebrity in American history.

Iraq is going to go down as one of the greatest blunders in American history.

The whole westward expansion myth is seen as romantic. But it’s a joke, a blot on American history.

I came in the gate as an African-American poor kid wanting to be a neurosurgeon but – with American life and the places I was put due to American history and laws and the oppression of black people – I had to make it work in other ways.

The George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin affair is one of the most important and clarifying moments in American history.

If we don’t empower families to be able to have a quality education, then their children – for the first time in American history, truly the first time – will not have the same economic opportunities.

If you’re going to call a book ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History,’ readers will expect some serious carrying on about race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint.

First of all, there’s no mention of political parties in the Constitution, so you begin American history with not only no political conventions but also no parties.

The great and abiding lesson of American history, particularly the cold war, is that the engine of capitalism, the individual, is mightier than any collective.

Every February, we celebrate the heritage and contributions of African Americans in North Carolina and around the country. North Carolina holds an important place in African American history going back generations.

Demagoguery is not unknown in American history.

Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.

In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.

Cheney refers to his vice presidency… as one of the most consequential vice presidencies in American history. And it clearly was.

I think people should look at learning about Native American history the same as visiting Washington, D.C., and seeing the monuments there. It’s all part of the package.

Like the attack on Pearl Harbor, another hinge event in American history, 9/11 was a great tactical victory for America’s enemies. But in both these cases, the tactical success of the attacks was not matched by strategic victories. Quite the reverse.

I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or a conservative, the election of Trump is a national tragedy for multiple reasons. It will go down as one of the worst tragedies in American history. But he’s not a dictator. This happened because we either allowed it or voted for it.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought an end to the ugly Jim Crow period in American history.

Most of the best music in American history was made by people with no options.

The Enron scandal is worthy of the highest level of scrutiny, both because of the enormity of the crimes that may have been committed and because of what the largest bankruptcy in American history has already begun to reveal about the weaknesses in our nation’s corporate structures and regulatory oversight.

I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that’s great.

Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama’s election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening.

For most of American history, of course, the important religious divides were between denominations – not just between Protestants and Catholics and Jews but between Lutherans and Episcopalians and Southern Baptists and the other endlessly fine-tuned sects.

What’s so interesting is taking kind of all these horror tropes and really finding black history and American history to layer on top of it.

The Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have taken the biggest lurch to the left in policy in American history. There’ve been no – no Congress, no administration that has run this far to the left in such a small period of time. And there is a reaction to that.

In the course of American history, great steps are taken by ordinary people, and ordinary people are not perfect.

Barack Obama is one of the greatest politicians in American history.

American history is the story of Democratic malefactors and Republican heroes.