Us History Quotes

“I once two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. When I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight. I foresaw the inevitable blight that would follow on the little slave's heart. I knew how soon her laughter would be changed to sighs. The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky. Scarcely one day of her life had been clouded when the sun rose on her happy bridal morning.

How had those years dealt with her slave sister, the little playmate of her childhood? She, also, was very beautiful; but the flowers and sunshine of love were not for her. She drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink.

In view of these things, why are ye silent, ye free men and women of the north? Why do your tongues falter in maintenance of the right? Would that I had more ability! But my heart is so full, and my pen is so weak! There are noble men and women who plead for us, striving to help those who cannot help themselves. God bless them! God give them strength and courage to go on! God bless those, every where, who are laboring to advance the cause of humanity!”
― Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

“In the history of American democracy, we have had undisciplined presidents. We have had inexperienced presidents. We have had amoral presidents. Rarely if ever before have we had them all at once.”
― Anonymous, A Warning

“Nowhere in the Bill of Rights are the words "unless inconvenient" to be found.”
― A.E. Samaan

“I have myself known two southern wives who exhorted their husbands to free those slaves towards whom they stood in a "parental relation;" and their request was granted. These husbands blushed before the superior nobleness of their wives' natures. Though they had only counseled them to do that which was their duty to do, it commanded their respect, and rendered their conduct more exemplary. Concealment was at an end, and confidence took the place of distrust.”
― Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself

“There was no hope on earth, and God seemed to have forgotten us. Some said they saw the Son of God; others did not see Him. If He had come, He would do some great things as He had done before. We doubted it because we had seen neither Him nor His works.”
― Red Cloud

“You have driven me from the East to this place, and I have been here two thousand years or more. [...] My friends, if you took me away from this land it would be very hard for me. I wish to die in this land, I wish to be an old man here. [...] I have not wished to give even a part of it to the Great Father [the President]. Though he were to give me a million dollars I would not give him this land. [...] When people want to slaughter cattle they drive them along until they get them to a corral, and then they slaughter them. So it was with us. [...] My children have been exterminated; my brother has been killed.”
― Standing Bear

“The white men in the East are like birds. They are hatching out their eggs every year, and there is not room enough in the East and they must go elsewhere; and they come west, as you have seen them coming for the last few years. And they are still coming, and will come until they overrun all of this country; and you can't prevent it. [...] Everything is decided in Washington by the majority, and these people come out west and see that the Indians have a big body of land they are not using, and they say we want the land.”
― George Crook

“In those days the Pimas always had plenty.

The Papagos who lived in the desert south of us did not have a river like the Gila to water their fields, and their food was never plentiful.

During the summer months, some of them would come to our village, with cactus syrup put up in little ollas, and salt, and we would give them beans and corn in exchange.

The only salt we had came from the Papagos. At a certain time of the year they would go down to the ocean and get the salt from the shore where the tide left the water to dry. It was a kind of ceremony with them.

They always felt that we gave them more than they could give us, although to get the salt they had walked hundreds of miles to the ocean and back. And so they would stay with us for a few days and help us harvest our wheat.”
― George Webb, A Pima Remembers

“Of a thousand Red Stick and allied insurgents, eight hundred were killed. [Andrew] Jackson lost forty-nine men.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

“Once elected president, Jackson lost no time in initiating the removal of all Indigenous farmers and the destruction of all their towns in the South.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

“The United States was not alone, however, in showing Washington due respect. Time had so changed that the British admiral made the sixty men-of-war off the English coast fly their flags at half-mast, for the very man whom his country had once wished to hang. In France, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered public mourning for ten days; for Washington's name was known and honored everywhere.”
― Hélène A. Guerber, The Story of the Americans

“[During World War I] General Pershing, commander in chief of our expeditionary forces, on arriving in France, officially visited Lafayette's grave, laid a wreath on it, and said, "Lafayette, we are here." By this, he meant that the Americans were eager to repay to France their debt of gratitude for what Lafayette had done for them during the Revolutionary War.”
― Hélène A. Guerber, The Story of the Americans

“All that part of Creation that lies within our observation is liable to change... If we look into history, we shall find some nations rising from contemptible beginnings and spreading their influence, until the whole globe is subjected to their ways...
England immediately upon this began to increase (the particular and minute cause of which I am not historian enough to trace) in power and magnificence, and is now the greatest nation upon the globe.
Soon after the Reformation a few people came over into the new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our people, according to the exactest computations, will in another century, become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have (I may say) all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us... Keep us in distinct colonies...
Be not surprised that I am turned politician. The whole town is immersed in politics.”
― John Adams

“The true source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think... Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write... Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments.”
― John Adams

“John [Adams] supposed there were two reasons why the British had gone after John Hancock. First, they wanted to make an example out of him, showing what would happen to anyone, no matter how rich, who dared to defy the new Townshend Act. Second, John Hancock was the biggest financial support of men like Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty. In fact, John Adams was reasonably sure that Sam Adams had no money whatsoever and that John Hancock was paying all his bills.”
― Janet Benge, John Adams: Independence Forever

“Europe, thou great theater of arts, sciences, commerce, war, am I at last permitted to visit thy territories?”
― John Adams

“...It was no accident that some of the first bureaucracies took shape in the West: the National Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which gradually took modern form as the older Indian Service sank beneath its long heritage of fraud and corruption), and the U.S. Geological Service. Mythologized as the heatland of individualism, the West became the kindergarten of the modern American state.”
― Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

“History abounds in and around New York City, however much of it is buried in the concrete of newer construction. The downtown financial district from Battery Park to Wall Street is such a historical district. Trinity Church at Wall Street and Broadway and the Churchyard surrounding it is where Alexander Hamilton and his wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton along with other notables are buried. The story of Alexander Hamilton is an important part of New York City’s history and has become a Broadway musical.
At the top of the Palisades in Weehawken is a small park known as the Dueling Grounds. This Revolutionary War site, overlooking New York City to the east, and what had been Half Moon Bay to the north and directly beneath it, is where Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of the United States, was mortally wounded by a single shot from Aaron Burr’s dueling pistol. He died the following day in Greenwich Village at the home of his friend William Bayard Jr.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater One"

“By 1980, the economic theory of neoliberalism, with its faith in free markets, property rights, and individual autonomy, had begun to reshape cultural notions of good citizenship. The good citizen was increasingly imagined as an autonomous, informed individual acting responsibly in his or her own self-interest, primarily through the market, as an educated consumer. Dovetailing with the new health consciousness, the ethos of neoliberalism shifted the burden of caring for the well-being of others from the state to the individual and recast health as a personal pursuit, responsibility, and duty. As the burden of solving social problems and preserving the health of individuals shifted from the public to the private sector, alternative dietary ideals reinforced the increasingly important social values of personal responsibility and consumer consumption.”
― Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health

“Sometimes you hear people say: "Those Apaches were bad." I don't know. They are peaceful people today, doing a good job with their livestock.
In the early days they did cause the Pimas, and others, some trouble. We had plenty from our farms and those Apaches only had what they could hunt over their wild mountains. Sometimes they would come down and raid us and we fought them back away from our settlements and then left them alone. They never tried to drive us off our land and away from our homes. We never tried to drive them out of their own country.
But the white man did.
If you were an Apache what do you think you would have done?
(from chapter "The Apache Wars")”
― George Webb, A Pima Remembers

“If you really wanted to understand this country, this alleged two-hundred-year attempt to establish a society on Enlightenment values, I could think of no better place to study that effort than from the perspective of those whom that society excluded and pillaged in order to bring those values into practice.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“When Sauk leader Black Hawk led his people back from a winter stay in Iowa to their homeland in Illinois in 1832 to plant corn, the squatter settlers there claimed they were being invaded, bringing in both Illinois militia and federal troops. The "Black Hawk War" that is narrated in history texts was no more than a slaughter of Sauk farmers. The Sauks tried to defend themselves but were starving when Black Hawk surrendered under a white flag.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

“With traumatized Navajos watching, government agents shot sheep and goats and left them to rot or cremated them after dousing them with gasoline. At one site alone, thirty-five goats were shot and left to rot. One hundred fifty thousand goats and fifty thousand sheep were killed in this manner. Oral history interviews tell of the pressure tactics on the Navajos, including arrests of those who resisted, and express bitterness over the destruction of their livestock.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

“If you wish to know hell before your time,' a Confederate officer wrote, 'go to Saint Simons Island and be hunted for ten days' by colored troops.”
― Thomas C. Barnwell Jr., Gullah Days: Hilton Head Islanders Before the Bridge 1861-1956

“One company stayed on without pay. The men, contrabands from Georgia, went to Saint Simons Island to help garrison the island. Proud to be the last soldiers in Hunter's regiment, they hunted invading rebels in dense palmetto thickets.”
― Thomas C. Barnwell Jr., Gullah Days: Hilton Head Islanders Before the Bridge 1861-1956

“Having voted for independence, they now needed to discuss and vote on the text of a declaration of independence that Thomas Jefferson had drawn up. The text Jefferson had written was read aloud, and throughout the day the delegates made changes. They deleted about twenty-five percent of the text, thinking it not applicable, or too emotive, or beside the point.”
― Janet Benge, John Adams: Independence Forever

“In 1890...the Magnolia State passed the Mississippi Plan, a dizzying array of poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, newfangled voter registration rules, and "good character" clauses—all intentionally racially discriminatory but dressed up in the genteel garb of bringing "integrity" to the voting booth.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“One delegate questioned him: "Will it not be done by fraud and discrimination?"

"By fraud, no. By discrimination, yes," Glass retorted.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“Bilbo was pointing to the power of the literacy test and understanding clause, which were tailor-made for societies that systematically refused to educate millions of their citizens and ensured that the bulk of the population remained functionally illiterate...for most of the twentieth century, many Jim Crow school systems did not have high schools for African Americans.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“Arkansas, for example, raised "only 5 percent of [its] total school budget by the poll tax, a tax that [kept] a good 80 percent of [the state's] adult citizens from voting.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy