Quotes on American History

I have crossed over on the backs of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Madam C. J. Walker. Because of them I can now live the dream. I am the seed of the free, and I know it. I intend to bear great fruit.

The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.

I'll change the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.

Populism is the simple premise that markets need to be restrained by society and by a democratic political system. We are not socialists or communists, we are proponents of regulated capitalism and, I might add, people who have read American history.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

American history is not something dead and over. It is always alive,always growing, always unfinished.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

These are the times that try men's souls.

Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Do I feel any pressure as the most decorated Winter Olympian in American history? None at all. The only pressures that I know I face are those of how to pay it forward: How can I continually make a positive impact in people's lives, help others achieve their dreams, create their own Olympic mindset, creating champions within themselves?

**** the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.

The potential for greatness lives within us all.

the better angels of our nature

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.

White America has seen to it that Black history has been suppressed in schools and in American history books. The bravery of hundreds of our ancestors who took part in slave rebellions has been lost in the mists of time, since plantation owners did their best to prevent any written accounts of uprisings.