Top 170 Civil War Quotes

Sometimes we see the Civil War in movies and imagine these neatly aligned rows of men with muskets, walking in line to shoot each other. In reality the things that fascinated me were how absolutely ruthless and violent so many engagements were, how much suffering and how men were not prepared.

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.

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.

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.

In 1961, an official U.S. commission oversaw thousands of events to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the American Civil War. All 50 states joined in, but not surprisingly, the biggest events took place in the 11 southern states that made up the defeated Confederacy.

Once we destroyed the Saddam regime, we knew there was going to be a civil war.

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.

Prior to the Civil War, most libraries were either privately owned or housed in universities or churches.

During the 1980s, international interest in the Nicaraguan war was intense. No conflict since the Spanish civil war had provoked such passion around the world. It was a classic good-versus-evil war.

The 2003 war in Iraq may be considered the greatest error in American policy since the Civil War. Its ramifications are earth-shattering and will impact us and our safety for generations. It may completely unravel the entire Middle East forever.

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.

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.

Abraham Lincoln went through 12 generals before he got Ulysses S. Grant. He had never done a Civil War before.

Here we will solve with laws and dollars, problems that too many people around the world still must solve with violence and civil war.

I want to help with Muslim integration. If you follow the line of Marine Le Pen, you create a civil war.

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.

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.

Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.

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.

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.’

With all due respect to re-enactors, I consider the Civil War too tragic a subject to make a game of.

The question of what actually caused the Civil War is secondary to the result of the Civil War, which is that after the war was over, slavery was ended, and the North and the South reconciled. And I think we need to respect that.

I lived in an atmosphere where Mama brought 60 Basque refugee children to England during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

I grew up in Georgia where my parents, little brother Zurab and I shared a flat with my paternal grandparents and two uncles in the capital, Tbilisi. Times were hard and the country was racked by civil war.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Civil war, now, 100 years in the future – the things that motivate human beings, they don’t change emotionally.

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.

During the Civil War, the Underground Railroad became a spy network, so we could still have fresh stories for these characters years into the future, with desperate people still doing desperate things.

In Rwanda, which has gone through a devastating civil war and has a per-capita income of $16 per year, half of members of Parliament are women. But in most countries, including the United States, theres a paucity of women in public office.

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.

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.

My family has served the country in almost every major war since the Civil War.

All nations struggle in the aftermath of civil war. More than 100 years after the English Civil War, for instance, any prelate who was ‘enthusiastic’ about religion attracted censure and suspicion.

Logan was talking about the Civil War, which claimed the lives of more than 500,000 Americans. He wanted to provide Civil War veterans with a day to pay respects to their fellow soldiers who did not live to see the end of the war, without losing a day’s pay.

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.

My own father was a refugee from the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, later going on to become a BBC radio producer after World War II.

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

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.

I think in English history a very interesting character is John Lilburne. Very interesting character because of the way he managed to develop the whole debate about the English civil war into something very different.

There’s always been deep divisions in this country – we had a civil war – and there’ve been regional and cultural and demographic. They’ve always been there.

If you print money like in Zimbabwe… the purchasing power of money goes down, and the standards of living go down, and eventually, you have a civil war.

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.

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.

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.