Top 55 Douglas Brinkley Quotes

The Rough Riders brought honor to San Antonio by winning battles in Cuba throughout the summer of 1898, and Roosevelt became a Texas folk hero overnight.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge – which 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.

Animals interest me more than anything else.

It’s very important that we keep these special, wild places. It defines the United States. Imagine our country without our national parks and our monuments. Here in California, imagine if you didn’t have in Southern Cal the Channel Islands or the great Highway 1, Big Sur up to Point Reyes up to the Redwood country.

February was always the cruelest month for Hunter S. Thompson. An avid NFL fan, Hunter traditionally embraced the Super Bowl in January as the high-water mark of his year.

The world of high-stakes international diplomacy can be rough and tumble, but it’s more often than not a procession of suits and summits, protocol sessions and photo ops.

I’m not a partisan.

The D-Day moniker wasn’t invented for the Allied invasion. The same name had been attached to the date of every planned offensive of World War II. It was first coined during World War I, at the U.S. attack at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, in France in 1918.

I have a lot of books I want to write.

With the newspapers cheering, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt chose a top-notch regiment of more than 1,250 men. They were first called Teddy’s Texas Tarantulas and went through three or four other monikers until Roosevelt’s Rough Riders stuck.

Everybody trusted Cronkite because he reminded them of their favorite uncle or trusted family physician. Being square in the age of the Beatles made Cronkite retro cool.

I’m not a historian who thinks Confederate memorials should be boarded up.

It is a long revisionist road up from the bottom for George W. Bush. He is ranked toward the bottom rung of presidents.

Knievel seemed braver and more brazen – and more unhinged – than any other athlete-cum-thrill-seeker of his era.

John Kerry only went to prep schools because he had an aunt who had the money to pay for his way into those prep schools.

John Kerry can be absolutely ruthless. I would not want to be on his enemies list when he’s ready to go after you.

For years, I longed to hear Armstrong describe what it was like to contemplate Earth from 238,900 miles away. Former Space Center director George Abbey once told me that many NASA astronauts felt that looking at Earth was akin to a religious experience.

I was only 8 years old on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong, 38-year-old commander of ‘Apollo 11,’ descended the cramped lunar module Eagle’s ladder with hefty backpack and bulky spacesuit to become the first human on the moon.

John Kerry had a very vivid imagination as a young person. I mean, he actually did go and take his bicycle from Norway to go camp in Sherwood Forest to be around the ghost of Robin Hood.

One thing ‘not right’ on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn’t been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.

Influenced by Pete Seeger and the Weavers, McLean proudly wore the mantle of troubadour in the early 1970s, when ‘American Pie’ topped the Billboard charts, and has never shed the cape.

Administration policies seem to tacitly encourage those who live below sea level in New Orleans to relocate permanently, to leave the dangerous water’s edge for more prosperous inland cities such as Shreveport or Baton Rouge.

In 1971, near the middle of Nixon’s first term, he approved a plan to install a White House taping system as a way of preserving an accurate chronicle of important discussions and decisions. Except for Nixon, three aides, and the Secret Service, no one knew about the listening devices.

Broadcast radio was entering its own golden age during the Depression, with live programming on stations all through the day. Local stations needed singers, musicians, announcers, and whipcord personalities, along with Christian clergy to give prayers and pundits to speak on world affairs.

In 2012, the city of Austin erected an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Willie Nelson in the heart of the business district. Schoolchildren, churchgoers, tourists, slackers, conventioneers, tech geeks – everybody, it seems – now congregate around this ponytailed shrine to outlaw country.

When we settled our country, the dark forest was considered in some ways evil and something that you needed to plow or, later, bulldoze. We now have a new understanding of the interconnectedness of ecosystems and the need for bird flyways and why all species matter.

Having recorded his first album, ‘Tapestry,’ in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the ‘generation lost in space.’

Stubbornness is a positive quality of presidential leadership – if you’re right about what you’re stubborn about.

To Armstrong, constantly speaking about ‘Apollo 11’ only diminished the magic. That’s why he worked overtime to avoid notice, living a quiet life in Indian Hill, Ohio.

When I was 8 years old, I made my own encyclopedia of American biography – Johnny Appleseed, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Charles Lindbergh, my pantheon of favorite heroes. Then I would write my own things and sew them together and try to make my own book.

If D-Day – the greatest amphibious operation ever undertaken – failed, there would be no going back to the drawing board for the Allies. Regrouping and attempting another massive invasion of German-occupied France even a few months later in 1944 wasn’t an option.

While the old spiritual ‘Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last’ was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

As a composer, Dylan now fits comfortably alongside George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, though he grumpily refuses to wear any man’s collar.

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.

There were three Selma-to-Montgomery marches in March 1965, and Rosa Parks had missed the first one. Parks, whose act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, moved to Detroit two years later for safety reasons.

The superhighway of celebrity and showmanship is filled with debris.

Rosa Parks’ entire career has been one as working as a civil rights activist.

Demeanor-wise, Reagan was a conservative, but a pragmatic conservative, and he found silver linings in things. He liked to be a mediator. He didn’t like to have enemies around him.

Nixon was always willing to be bipartisan, so there are a lot of surprises in the man.

Usually, one day in a century rises above the others as an accepted turning point or historic milestone. It becomes the climactic day, or ‘the day,’ of that century.

Ever since Willie Nelson brought rednecks into an alliance with hippies back in the psychedelic ’70s, Austin has milked its quirky libertarian spirit for a worldwide bonanza of free publicity.

I think, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks will go down as one of the two most well-known and remembered figures out of the Civil Rights Movement.

When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan was frustrated and furious, as Bush was after 9/11. But he didn’t stick us in a war in the Middle East with no exit.

If Reagan had intelligence information that showed that the upheaval in Egypt is actually Democratic in spirit, then he would have, I believe, turned his back on Mubarak, even though there’s a long friendship between the United States and Egypt.

There is no real way to categorize McLean’s ‘American Pie’ for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.

If you’re a Kennedy and you go to Italy or you go to Argentina, you’re treated as royalty. And in the United States, we’re endlessly fascinated by the family.

One of the things I learned in editing ‘The Reagan Diaries’ is to never say what Reagan would do, because he surprised people.

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.

John Kerry doesn’t think in terms of black-and-white. He’s all gray, and he looks at all sides of the issues. That makes people think he likes to be devil’s advocate. Whatever you say, he’ll challenge you on.

How one deals with the death of a loved one is a highly personalized affair. Some people weep for days; others take a hike in the woods or count rosary beads.

I think there’s a green side to John Kerry, if you like, that he’s an environmental activist. His record on the environment is as best as you have on a pro-environment record of anybody in the U.S. Senate.

President Abraham Lincoln never lost his ardor for the United States to remain united during the Civil War.