Explore Quotes by Stephen 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.

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.

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?

Washington, not Jefferson, freed his slaves upon his death.

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

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

There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.

The more sophisticated we get, the more advanced our buildings and vehicles become, the more vulnerable we are.

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

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.

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

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

In 1945, there were more people killed, more buildings destroyed, more high explosives set off, more fires burning than before or since.

I've always tried to be fair to my subjects. That's easy when they are as likable and admirable as Lewis and Clark, or Eisenhower.

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

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

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

Dams have harmed our wildlife and made rivers less useful for recreation.

Andrew Johnson was a Southerner generally who proclaimed that his native state of Tennessee was a country for white men.

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