Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by Douglas Brinkley - Page 2

The very fact that Barack Obama - an African-American - was twice elected to the presidency will always be the lead line in that hard-to-meld, gold-plated paragraph.

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.'

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.

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.

Truman has become the patron saint of failed presidents because he left office with a 27 percent approval rating, and people were saying, 'To err is Truman,' yet look at what he did: the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, the Truman Doctrine.

Theodore Roosevelt had been enthralled with the idea of Texas since 1883, when he arrived in the Dakota Territory to ranch cattle.

The answer to New Orleans's levee woes is painfully obvious: money and willpower.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

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

Now I'm the father of three children; I'm not able to go live on a bus and do semesters around the country like I did when I was young.

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

Unfortunately, one of the biggest misperceptions the American public harbors is that Katrina was a week-long catastrophe. In truth, it's better to view it as an era.

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.

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.

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.

What makes 'American Pie' so unusual is that it isn't a relic from the counterculture but a talisman, which, like a sacred river, keeps bringing joy to listeners everywhere. When 'American Pie' suddenly is played on a jukebox or radio, it's almost impossible not to sing along.

History chalks up Mr. McKinley's War as a U.S. win, and he also polls favorably as a 'near great' president.

Some presidents, such as Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, are political sailors - they tack with the wind, reaching difficult policy objectives through bipartisan maneuvering and pulse-taking.

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.

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.

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.

I think Ronald Reagan is what happened....The age of Reagan brought conservatism into the mainstream....It also brought us the beginning of the new media-talk radio, the internet, cable television.

I learned more about history and literature in the used bookstores in DC than in college libraries.

Politicians wanted to mine the Grand Canyon for zinc and copper, and Theodore Roosevelt said no.

Do we pour $40 billion into grandiose Louisiana engineering projects or do we instead put up no trespassing- signs in the areas below sea level? All are hard choices with various merits and pains. The important thing, however, is for America to decide whether the current policy of inaction is really the way we want to deal with the worst natural disaster in our history.

Hurricane Katrina is without question the worst natural disaster in American history.

Forget politics. The real story is the advancements being made in medicine. We're on the verge of conquering cancer and Alzheimer's and numerous other diseases. The DNA revolution has just begun. Scientific advancement usually trumps politics.

Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie.