Top 1200 American Civil War Quotes & Sayings

All American wars (except the Civil War) have been fought with the odds overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. In the history of armed combat such affairs as the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars must be ranked, not as wars at all, but as organized assassinations. In the two World Wars, no American faced a bullet until his adversaries had been worn down by years of fighting others.

What it targets is not something that's really looked at a lot in terms of the war. This is stuff that's off the beaten path in terms of what we think of every time you start a Civil War history or a Civil War presentation. It's usually about the military and the soldiers and all that stuff. And this is not. It's the backdrop to a place and a time and circumstances that didn't have anything to do with that.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

When you come to Montgomery, you see fifty-nine monuments and memorials, all about the Civil War, all about Confederate leaders and generals. We have lionized these people, and we have romanticized their courage and their commitment and their tenacity, and we have completely eliminated the reality that created the Civil War.

Offering thanks in the midst of tragedy is an American tradition, . even during a bloody Civil War.

The very same British and American families who had combined to wreck the Indian textile industry in the promotion of the opium trade [...] combined to make the trade, a valuable source of revenue. In 1864 they joined forces to create causes for war and to promote the terrible War Between the States, also known as the American Civil War.

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

The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.

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.

I didn't know enough about the Civil War or its lingering effects as we all should. It's really easy to think that the Civil War was the end of slavery, and the triumph of our collective conscience and humanity over oppression. Sadly, the oppression and systemic subjugation of people of color in this country still exists.

The United States has used force abroad more than 130 times, but has only declared war five times - the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and World Wars I and II.

In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.

Declarations of war have never been a constitutional requirement for military action abroad. The United States has used force abroad more than 130 times, but has only declared war five times - the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and World Wars I and II.

Even if Iraq IS a civil war, people have won civil wars.

We know that there were so many Japanese American soldiers in World War II who were fighting in Europe despite the fact that their families, their parents were back home in American prison camps. It's savagely ironic that between themselves and the African-American soldiers, who were also segregated and didn't see the fruition of the work the culminated in the Civil Rights Act until the '60s, that these American heroes and their stories are not well known; and the fact that the 442nd/100th became the most decorated unit in U.S. history.

Everyone believes that the prospect for a civil war has diminished significantly over the past several days. All the mainstream leaders of Iraq believe that civil war must be avoided. It's very positive that they are all saying it.

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.

Whether the struggle was between English merchants and the American colonies, pre Civil War northern manufacturers vs. southern slave holders, or American grain farmers and auto manufacturers seeking advantage in the Mexican agriculture and labor markets in the 1990s, U.S. policy has reflected the economic clash of interests of the day.

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.

I have been trying to create a campaign to have our country make an apology for slavery, for the way that blacks were treated before the Civil War and after the Civil War.

In the end, no amount of American forces can solve the political differences that lie at the heart of somebody else's civil war.

When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.

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.

I have prophesied for years that I was born for a Great War; that if I did not witness the coming of the Second American Civil War, I would begin it myself.

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.

I worry that I may have overstated the impact of Civil War on the utopians. By the time the Civil War comes, most of the communities were quite separated from the wider American society. Their rhetoric is still about transforming the world, but they're not having that much traffic with their neighbors.

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.

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.

So about 80 years after the Constitution is ratified, the slaves are freed. Not so you'd really notice it of course; just kinda on paper. And that of course was at the end of the Civil War. Now there is another phrase I dearly love. That is a true oxymoron if I've ever heard one: "Civil War." Do you think anybody in this country could ever really have a civil war? "Say, pardon me?" (shoots gun) "I'm awfully sorry. Awfully sorry."

I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.

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.

Finland had a civil war less than 100 years ago, just like in Ireland. If you look at the history of newly independent nations, civil war is almost every time present, even in the United States.

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

Steve Bannon is the biggest threat to democracy that we've faced since the Civil War, but in the Civil War the champion of democracy was in the White House. So, even then, we were probably in less danger as a country than we are right now.

The United States came within a whisker of invading Utah in 1858 and starting a civil war three years before the Civil War. Because the conflict ended up fizzling out, it's not the most dramatic story about the West.

All that rejection from Republicans has a bit of a racist element. It was very necessary to have a black president, and it's been a great thing. It will help, in the end, to ease the trauma of slavery and civil war. The war against slavery cost almost 800,000 American lives - that's how strongly they felt about it. And it's not going to go away in a century.

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.

There is no time in American history in which there was more economic conflict between segments of the population than there was prior to the Civil War.

War can only be qualified by its object, and there is neither foreign war nor civil war, there is only just or unjust war.

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.

I think there's evil on both sides [of Syria], and I think that's one reason I don't want to be involved in civil war. I see things in personal terms. I just can't see sending one of my sons - or your son or daughter - to fight in a civil war, where on one side we have a dictator, who in all likelihood gassed his people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Obama was elected in a flourish of promise that many in the African-American community believed would help not only to symbolize African-American progress since the Civil War and Civil Rights Acts but that his presidency would result in doors opening in the halls of power as had never been seen before by black America.

Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.

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.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.

I'm working on a script right about Civil War re-enactors who go back in time to the actual Civil War. It's kind of a big, crazy Back to the Future comedy. So, of course, it's the Civil War - I play the banjo. I was just having a conversation with one of the producers about some of the material and he was like, 'You know, we have to work in a scene where you play the banjo. And I was like I'll get behind that.

The Goldschmidts had joined forces with other Rothschild cousins, the Bischoffsheims, to form a banking partnership which financed the North in the American Civil War.

The American people deserve answers about Benghazi before we move forward with military involvement in Syria's civil war.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil 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 U.S. Constitution has absorbed the end of slavery, the Civil War, Civil Rights and Watergate.

The intelligence community is so vast that more people have top secret clearance than live in Washington. The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

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.

We are in a new Civil War, and just like the last, it is a struggle for the sanctity of the Union - and it's hardly civil.

There is no clear or meaningful difference between insurgency and civil war, or between national terrorism and civil war for that matter.

History of America, Part I (1776-1966): Declaration of Independence, Constitutional Convention, Louisiana Purchase, Civil War, Reconstruction, World War I, Great Depression, New Deal, World War II, TV, Cold war, civil-rights movement, Vietnam. History of America, Part II (1967-present): the Super Bowl era. The Super Bowl has become Main Street’s Mardi Gras.