Bruce Catton Quotes

Say this much for big league baseball - it is beyond question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.

To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it - this is a hard lesson.

Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made

There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect.

Progress is the sum of small victories won by individual human beings.

A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.

Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.

And there is the headlight, shining far down the track, glinting off the steel rails that, like all parallel lines, will meet in infinity, which is after all where this train is going.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.

Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.

Shiloh had as many casualties as Waterloo, and yet there were another 20 Waterloos to come.

Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other and killed each other in great numbers - if only to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive of how that was possible.

Men see things late, and it may be that at times an evil fate drives them on.

Yet there is a dignity in the human spirit which can become most clearly visible in the moment of defeat and disaster.

Like most Rebel soldiers, Sam Watkins owned no slaves.

Early youth is a baffling time

The 1860 election became a referendum on the southern way of life.

The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to that of the United States.

Soldiers who had been in the army long enough to know what a bloody swindle war really is would begin to feel that army life was really kind of fun, as long as [General Philip] Sheridan was up front.

Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.