Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.
Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life.
You can’t be a full participant in our democracy if you don’t know our history.
I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.
You have to have wisdom and knowledge as well as virtue to preserve your rights and liberties.
First of all, you can make the argument that there’s no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.
I can fairly be called an amateur because I do what I do, in the original sense of the word – for love, because I love it. On the other hand, I think that those of us who make our living writing history can also be called true professionals.
The past after all is only another name for someone else’s present.
America faces an enemy who believes in enforced ignorance. And all that we stand for is the open mind, the generous spirit, the ideal of tolerance, freedom, education, opportunity.
Freedom is found through the portals of our nation’s libraries.
We must not think of learning as only what happens in schools. It is an extended part of life. The most readily available resource for all of life is our public library system.
We should draw on our story, we should draw on our history. If we don’t know who we are, if we don’t know how we became what we are, we’re going to start suffering from all the obvious detrimental effects of amnesia.
To this noble end the delegates had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
The preparations were elaborate and mammoth in scale, and Washington threw himself into the effort, demanding that not an hour be lost.
Washington was a man of exceptional, almost excessive self-command, rarely permitting himself any show of discouragement or despair.
History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
However little television you watch, watch less.
It would be the most crucial day of the entire war.
How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don’t know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?
Yes, this is a dangerous time. Yes, this is a time full of shadows and fear. But we have been through worse before and we have faced more difficult days before. We have shown courage and determination, and skillful and inventive and courageous and committed responses to crisis before.