Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Heather Cox Richardson

Producing 1,200 words every day, when you're already working a full-time job is a lot.

Under Ronald Reagan, hatred of the liberal media took on a storybook quality. Reagan had honed his political skills as a spokesman for General Electric.

Dog whistles about women who want handouts are simply an acceptable way to say that women are not worth as much as the men who must dominate the government. At the heart of Movement Conservatism is the conviction that America belongs to elite men alone.

I have always been a letter writer, and I found when my numbers got over half a million, I couldn't think about how many people there were out there. I had to think as if I were writing a letter to my brothers and sisters, to my good friends with whom I have had a correspondence since I could hold a pen.

The Democratic political juggernaut that emerged from the Depression and the New Deal meant that Republicans had to scramble to figure out a way to recover their former dominance.

Roosevelt's New Deal regulated business, protected social welfare and promoted national infrastructure on the principle that the role of government was not simply to protect the property of the wealthy, but rather was to promote equality of opportunity for all.

The fantasy world of Movement Conservatives is no longer fringe talk. The leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination embrace it. They are playing to a chorus of true believers, and they are preaching what that choir wants to hear. They are following the same pattern Eric Hoffer identified as the path to authoritarianism.

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.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have argued that policies embraced by a majority of Americans to promote equality of opportunity actually infringe liberty by hampering businessmen's actions or taking their money through taxes.

When a president, as Trump does, demonises opponents as an un-American mob trying to destroy the country, it is not a lunatic who tries to harm them, it is a patriot.

The number of states in the union has been fixed at 50 for so long, few Americans realize that throughout most of our history, the addition of new states from time to time was a normal part of political life.

The extremism of the Trump administration has galvanized women to push back against the political system that has disadvantaged them for a generation.

The question of impeaching Donald Trump is about replacing the toxic partisanship of today's Republican party with America's traditional rule of law. It has become a constitutional imperative.

Beginning in 1981, when government policies began to undermine the liberal consensus of the previous generation, wealth began to diverge. It is more unevenly distributed than ever before.

The Middle Way included the largest public works project in American history: the Interstate Highway system, which updated American roads for a driving generation with leisure time on their hands, but expanded the federal government's purview.

Republicans controlled the federal government for decades after the Civil War, and their policies funneled wealth upward -- with dire consequences. In 1893, the economy crashed, and too few Americans had enough purchasing power to revive it. Lincoln had been right: Government that served the wealthy would ruin the country.

When Ronald Reagan's administration was exposed for having illegally sold arms to Iran to raise money covertly for the Contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government, Reagan acknowledged that the evidence was damning - yet defended the principle behind the scheme.

In the mid 19th century, it had taken a generation of political rhetoric to induce southern soldiers to fight for the interests of a small ruling class in the name of democracy.

Three times before, in the 1850s, the 1890s, and the 1920s, oligarchs took over the American government and threatened to destroy democracy. In each case, they overreached, and regular folks took back their government.

By the 1870s, ex-Confederates had taken their support for Western individualism a step further. They insisted the federal government was actively persecuting Western individuals.

Some dramatic event often crystallizes popular attention, and the world turns on a dime.

The USPS is self-funding; it does not receive support from tax dollars, and it is required to serve the entire country.

Movement Conservatism was a fringe force from the 1950s until the 1980s, when voters elected Movement Conservative Ronald Reagan to the White House. But even then, their control of the Republican Party was not a given.

The only way to stop gaslighting is to shine the light of reality onto a situation. That makes it imperative for the perpetrator to keep victims in the dark.

Special counsel Robert Mueller, investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, provided ample evidence that the president should be investigated for obstruction of justice in his attempt to quell the Russia investigation by firing Comey and urging aides to lie.

FDR's New Deal and, after it, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower's similar Middle Way, used the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure, like roads and bridges.

The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite.

The Attorney General of the United States is, of course, not the president's lawyer. The AG is supposed to be the attorney for the United States, protecting the rule of law.

The Republican approach to handling the coronavirus and the economy is apparently not to turn to our government, but to put our heads down, go on as usual, and hope for a vaccine.

Democracy was always a gamble. In 1776, the founders rejected the old idea that government should be based on hierarchies according to wealth or birth or religion.

The roots of Nixon's political descent lay at least as far back as May 1970, when the shooting of four young Americans at Kent State University began to turn the president's moderate supporters against him.

If Republican leaders are willing to enable Trump's autocratic enthusiasms in return for oligarchy, American democracy will die.

The same Republicans who had threatened to impeach Hillary Clinton remained silent when, immediately after his surprise victory, Trump refused to abide by laws about emoluments or nepotism, openly profiting from the presidency and filling the White House with personal relatives.

In the 1880s and 1890s, extremists in the Republican party also threatened the future of the US. Just when it seemed the extremists' control of the government was complete, their political machinations, propaganda, and demonization of their opposition fueled a dramatic backlash.

Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.

Trump's administration looks a great deal like those of the 1850s and the 1890s, with business and government so intertwined that they cannot be disentangled.

The only thing that's really hard for me is when I go to bed after everybody else in my house gets up. And that - you just feel stale. It just feels awful to be still finishing your day when everybody else is starting theirs.

Today, the District of Columbia has more residents than at least two other states; Puerto Rico has more than 20. With numbers like that, admitting either or both to the union is less a political power play on the Democrats' part than the late-19th-century partisan move that still warps American politics.

In short, Republicans under Trump have finally destroyed the New Deal, turning the government over to a small cadre of wealthy businessmen, unhampered, to run the country as they see fit.

We often get impeachment inquiries or moves for impeachment inquiries on one president or another, and it doesn't go anywhere.

In the 1820s, westerners and political outsiders worried that rich men in the east had commandeered the government for their own ends.

In fact, there is no law that says election results must come the same day as the election. Historically, they used to take days.

Traditional Republicanism grew up in the 1850s as opposed to the Democrats, who always saw the world kind of as a 'us vs. them' proposition. That the world was limited; the economy was limited.

The Teapot Dome scandal seemed to epitomize the administration of the president at the time, Warren G. Harding, although Harding himself was not implicated in that particular scandal.

Abraham Lincoln and others recoiled from the idea of government as a prop for the rich. In organizing the Republican Party, they highlighted the equality of opportunity promised in the Declaration of Independence and warned that a healthy economy depended on widespread prosperity.

To make sure Republicans stayed in power, they suppressed voting by people likely to vote Democratic, and gerrymandered states so that even if Democrats won a majority of votes, they would have a minority of representatives.

Voter suppression in Florida in 2000 helped put Republican George W Bush into office despite losing the popular vote and the targeting of state legislative elections in 2010 enabled Republicans to gerrymander states out of Democrat reach.

Republicans are a shrinking minority ruling an increasingly angry majority that not only wants to change the Republican policies that are moving wealth upward, but also threatens to hold Republican leaders accountable to the law.

Since 1980, Republican shredding of the social safety net has disproportionately hit women, particularly women of colour.

Trump is a populist in the same mold as the nineteenth-century Populists who gave their name to American grassroots political movements. Historians and pundits argued themselves blue in the face over whether Populists were reactionary or progressive, but they were both.

In contrast to them, Republicans argue, are minorities, organized workers, and women, who demand government policies that can only be paid for with tax dollars sucked from white men.

Nixon clearly broke laws. He clearly believed he needed to stay in power to protect the country. But he recognized that he was breaking the law, and he tried to cover it up.

Since 2000, Republican policies have suppressed Democratic voting; since 2010, Republican gerrymandering has given the Republicans a heavy systematic advantage in Congress; and the last two Republican presidents have won the White House while losing the popular vote to their opponents.

One of the things historians do is we look for patterns. And in many ways, Donald Trump is a very easy read, because he operates in certain ways. And he is the king of distraction.

In the individualist ideology, a man is responsible for his wife and children. This relegates women to domestic roles as wives and mothers protected by their menfolk, or silences them as special interest harpies demanding government benefits that will destroy individualist men.

Trump's alliance with Russia's Vladimir Putin, in defiance of America's own intelligence community, the Department of Justice, and the bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, forces us to face that the fundamental principles of our nation are under attack.

New states were supposed to join the union when they reached a certain population, but in the late 19th century, population mattered a great deal less than partisanship.

The government's job, according to modern Republicans, is not the protection of equal opportunity for all Americans, but rather the protection of male breadwinners.

Americans are right to wonder if, at long last, what George Washington called the Great Experiment has failed, and that our founders have lost their extraordinary wager that regular people could govern themselves better than a few rich men could.

Since Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the New Deal in the 1930s, radical conservatives have railed against the idea that the government should intervene in the economy.