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.

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.

The force that has come closest across American history to actually ending America was white supremacy. That was the Civil War.

What was the reason for invading Iraq’ Was it a humanitarian crusade or an economic one’ I would be inclined to say the latter. It was the same with the Civil War, because the landed gentry’s money was being stolen by the king.

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.

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.

But my point is these Civil War songs were gruesome. The hatred that’s so bad in this country today, and for the past 10 or 15 years, bad as it is, is nothing compared to the kind of things people would write down and sing back in the Civil War.

Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep – not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.

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.

We have no vital national interest in Syria’s civil war.

In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war.

The Civil War has a tremendous moral and emotional force.

If President Obama or any president ever attempts gun confiscation in America, there should be and will be a second civil war.

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.

The Civil War always moves me.

In the nineteenth century, in part because a ton of American men moved west, in part because of the Civil War, and in part because of trepidation about marriage, which was then a very confining institution, there was a big population of women – mostly middle-class white women on the East Coast – who didn’t marry.

Because of the Lebanese civil war, I had a scattered childhood. I had to build my own connections to each country we moved to.

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.

I was born about 80 years too late. If you were a kid in 1910, the Fourth of July was a big deal. You knew all about the Revolution, and you still had Civil War veterans.

Going back to South Sudan after the independence took place was deeply emotional for me because I had gone through the civil war with my family just before going to seek refuge in London.

Iraq is in a civil war. There is no road in that country that is safe.

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.

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.

The American Civil War produced carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time.

When I was a girl, civil war in Sudan forced me to flee my home town of Wau.

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.

When Ukrainians kill Ukrainians, I believe this is as close to a civil war as you can get.

With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free.

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.

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.

Before the Civil War, there were no national cemeteries, no processes for identifying the dead in the battle. There weren’t any dog tags, and there was no next-of-kin notification. You didn’t necessarily even hear what the fate of your loved ones had been. It was up to their comrades to write and inform you.

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.

Occasionally, a re-enactment is a fine thing. I love Civil War re-enactments.

Magna Carta and the Civil War were about the power to tax.

I was terrified watching ‘Civil War’ for the first time.

There’s an ugly civil war side to revolutionary Boston that we don’t often talk about and a lot of thuggish, vigilante behavior by groups like the Sons of Liberty.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You cannot be President of the United States if you don’t have faith. Remember Lincoln, going to his knees in times of trial in the Civil War and all that stuff.

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.

It would be immoral to walk away from the consequences of our actions, leaving behind anarchy and civil war in Iraq.

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.

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.

Being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line.

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

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.

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.

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.

A Failure in this Duty did once involve our Nation in all the Horrors of Rebellion and Civil War.

I used to have nightmares about the civil war when I got to England at ages 14 to 15. It took me some years to get over that.

Every movie, I complicate. I make the hard choices. I remember when I was pitching ‘Pan’s Labyrinth:’ An anti-fascist fairy tale set in Civil War Spain, where the girl dies at the end. It’s not easy.

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.

I was born and raised in New York. My family has been in New York City since the Civil War. I have a ton of N.Y.C. in my DNA, from both sides of my family. I had a wonderful childhood in the city.

I like metal detecting, collecting Civil War artifacts, fishing, hunting, cigars, Labradors, the outdoor life, my baseball game, football.

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.

America after Trump may be more like the European Union; a rambling alliance of interstate compacts, rather than the forced marriage of a country that emerged after the Civil War.

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.

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.

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.

I am absolutely not saying that Milosevic might not be responsible for all sorts of atrocities, but I believe that what’s been left out of public debate and the press is that there was a civil war going on there.

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.

While they trace their history back to wars that helped to ethnically cleanse Native Americans and to their exploits in the Civil War fighting for the South, the modern-day Rangers were created to help rejuvenate a defeated and demoralized U.S. imperialism after the war in Vietnam.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The civil war in Syria is complex and devastating.

I used to do Civil War re-enacting between the ages of 15 and 19. I was part of a unit that was considered very authentic. We would source the right wools, the right buttons for the costumes. We had the right look.

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.

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.

The Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, was put into effect on January 1, 1863, but news of the Proclamation and enforcement did not reach Texas until after the end of the Civil War almost two years later.

No one will ever be able to say what the comandantes would have done with their historic opportunity in Nicaragua if they had not been confronted with civil war.

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.

Intervening militarily would exacerbate – not resolve – the matter and, in the process, will Americanize the Syrian civil war.

Americans in the Civil War period were very interested in Heaven and what it might be like, because they were having to face the fact that many of their loved ones were gone and many of their loved ones, they hoped, were in this other realm called Heaven.

Mum and Dad met campaigning on the Spanish civil war. Both were active peace campaigners. They died in 1986 and ’87.

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.

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.

I grew up 60 minutes way from Richmond, in Charlottesville, Virginia and, as a child, I was obsessed with the Civil War. I used to do re-enactments and all that stuff.

When you have warfare, things happen; people suffer; the noncombatants suffer as well as the combatants. And so it happens in civil war.

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.

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.

Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.

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.

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.

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!

I jokingly say if there was one great thing about, you know, the Lebanese Civil War was that it forced me to read.

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I was 10 years old, I fled my homeland amid the bomb blasts of civil war in Sudan.

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.

The middle of ‘America’s Women’ is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency.

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.

When you scan the globe’s hot spots, every civil war and massacre, every act of terror and every clash between states has its unique local circumstances.

I can’t discuss the possibility of the U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war without also talking about Benghazi.

With the likely nominations of Barack Obama by the Democrats and John McCain by the Republicans, one of these two parties is headed for a 2009 crack-up that could prove as messy as any party civil war in recent history.

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.

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.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

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.

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.

For all those who experienced it, the Spanish Civil War was devastating.

And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be ‘Civil War’ – not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.

Madam C.J. Walker was born in 1867, two years after the civil war ended. She was a daughter of a slave. She had no formal education. Both her parents died by the time she was seven. Yet, by the time she died in 1919 at age 51, she was one of the most successful businesswomen America had ever seen.

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.

Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.

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.

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.

In 2001, I moved from Philly to Atlanta, where I lived for six years. I had never lived anywhere but Philly, and you can imagine the culture shock; the Civil War seeps into daily life and conversation down South in a way it never does up North.

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.

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.

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.

The majority of U.S. high school students don’t know within 50 years when the Civil War occurred.

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.

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 shot’ kept the party dominant for decades; from 1868 to 1912, only one Democrat – Grover Cleveland – won the White House.

The civil war which has so long prevailed between Spain and the Provinces in South America still continues, without any prospect of its speedy termination.

The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990, spanned four World Cups. It would have been a more symmetrical five had the Lebanese begun in 1974, but you know, we’re Mediterranean, and timing isn’t our forte.