Stephen E. Ambrose Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

The American Constitution is the greatest governing document, and at some 7,000 words, just about the shortest.

Stephen E. Ambrose
You don't hate history, you hate the way it was taught to you in high school.

Stephen E. Ambrose
The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.

Stephen E. Ambrose
I thought Nixon was the worst President we had ever had, save only perhaps Andrew Johnson.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Friends never cheat on each other, or take advantage, or lie. Friends do not spy on one another, yet they have no secrets. Friends glory in each other's successes and are downcast by the failures. Friends minister to each other, nurse each other. Friends give to each other, worry about each other, stand always ready to help. Perfect friendship is rarely achieved, but at its height it is an ecstasy.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Like their predecessors, the Presidents of today just throw up their hands.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Trial by jury. Live wherever you can make a living. How could a government based on such principles fail?

Stephen E. Ambrose
We are part of a country that outshines those that have gone before us and most of those in existence today.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Writing is not the easiest way to make a living. Your work long hours, usually all by yourself. It is not a way to make money.

Stephen E. Ambrose
It is through history that we learn who we are and how we got that way, why and how we changed, why the good sometimes prevailed and sometimes did not.

Stephen E. Ambrose
In America, Jefferson noted with approval, women knew their place.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Jefferson owned slaves. He did not believe that all were created equal. He was a racist.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Immigrants do more than help us win our wars, or set up cleaning shops or ethnic restaurants.

Stephen E. Ambrose
World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

Stephen E. Ambrose
As to the Indians, the guiding principle was, promise them anything just so long as they get out of the way.

Stephen E. Ambrose
When Hitler declared war on the United States, he was betting that German soldiers, raised up in the Hitler Youth, would always out fight American soldiers, brought up in the Boy Scouts. He lost that bet. The Boy Scouts had been taught how to figure their way out of their own problems.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Washington and Jefferson were both rich Virginia planters, but they were never friends.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Crazy Horse saw history as integrated in the present, incorporated into daily life.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Lieutenant Welsh remembered walking around among the sleeping men, and thinking to himself that 'they had looked at and smelled death all around them all day but never even dreamed of applying the term to themselves. They hadn't come here to fear. They hadn't come to die. They had come to win.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Even before Watergate and his resignation, Nixon had inspired conflicting and passionate emotions.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Johnson had been the most powerful man in the world, yet the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong had resisted, overcome his power, broken his will.

Stephen E. Ambrose
I was taught by professors who had done their schooling in the 1930s. Most of them were scornful of, even hated, big business.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Nixon regarded himself as having been cheated by life. He never got my vote.

Stephen E. Ambrose
To be a slaveholder meant one had to regard the African American as inferior in every way.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Who today is willing to say that Texas and California and the remainder of the Southwest would be better off if they were governed by Mexico?

Stephen E. Ambrose
Eisenhower had the clearest blue eyes. He would fix them on you. In my every interview with him, he would lock his eyes on to mine and keep them there.

Stephen E. Ambrose
At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and won, and we all of us, living and yet to be born, must be forever profoundly grateful.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.

Stephen E. Ambrose
Within Easy Company they had made the best friends they had ever had, or would ever have. They were prepared to die for each other; more important, they were prepared to kill for each other.

Stephen E. Ambrose