American Civil War Quotes

Aaron reached into his jacket pocket and took out his Bible, a gift from his father, Captain Benjamin K. Matthews, on the the day he had ridden off to war. Aaron opened to the Psalms, intending to read, but his eyes were heavy and closed against his will. O death, where is thy sting? Pastor Blackwell had told him that death had no power over him, but he sure felt that sting now. O grave, where is thy victory? How much longer would it be? Just four miles from home. Would Mama ever know?
Shiloh, the place of peace. Good ground to die on. Holy ground. ~ Karl A. Bacon

Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this …. The quarrel between the North and the South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel."
--Charles Dickens, 1861 article on the cause of the American Civil War ~ Charles Dickens

The American Civil War produced carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time. ~ Drew Gilpin Faust

We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Nathan Bedford Forrest ... used his horsemen as a modern general would use motorized infantry. He liked horses because he liked fast movement, and his mounted men could get from here to there much faster than any infantry could; but when they reached the field they usually tied their horses to trees and fought on foot, and they were as good as the very best infantry. Not for nothing did Forrest say the essence of strategy was to git thar fust with the most men. ~ Bruce Catton

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. ~ Bruce Catton

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood. ~ John Mason Brown

Darkest of all Decembers ever has my life known, Sitting here by the embers, stunned, helpless, alone. ~ Mary Boykin Chesnut

Farewell, we must part; we have turned from the land
Of our cold-hearted brother, with tyrannous hand,
Who assumed all our rights as a favor to grant,
And whose smile ever covered the sting of a taunt;

Who breathed on the fame he was bound to defend -
Still the craftiest foe, 'neath the guise of a friend;
Who believed that our bosoms would bleed at a touch,
Yet could never believe he could goad them too much;

Whose conscience affects to be seared with our sin,
Yet is plastic to take all its benefits in;
The mote in our eye so enormous has grown,
That he never perceives there's a beam in his own. ~ Frank Moore

Though I never ordered it, and never wished for it, I have never shed any tears over the event, because I believe that it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the war. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman

It is hard to realize today that "government" during the American Civil War a hundred years ago meant the merest handful of people. Lincoln's Secretary of War had fewer than fifty civilian subordinates, most of them not "executives" and policy-makers but telegraph clerks. The entire Washington establishment of the U.S. government in Theodore Roosevelt's time, around 1900, could be comfortably housed in any one of the government buildings along the Mall today. ~ Peter F. Drucker

I suppose this work is part of the devil that is in us all. ~ Ulysses S. Grant

Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The movement to join Washington had a substantial following in the 1850s, centred in Montreal...It faced considerable resistance, though - in part because the United States was having one of its periodic convulsions of nativist politics and a furious debate over the slave trade. In fact, the U.S.-annexation movement would receive its final rebuff not from colonial-minded Canadians but from the Confederate states, who feared that the addition of the British North American colonies to the 31 states would tip the political balance of power away from slavery. ~ Doug Saunders

From a long view of the history of mankind, seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade. ~ Richard Feynman

For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say! ~ Wilhelm Reich

The American Civil War lays out the stark contrast: the greatest generals in war are often abundant failures during peacetime, and vice versa. McClellan and Sherman are the sharpest contrasts; but there is also Grant the peacetime drunkard, and Stonewall Jackson the barely tolerable military professor. Only Lee stands out as effective in both peace and war (and even he had a mentally unstable father, and himself may have been dysthymic in his general personality). This conflict reflects, I think, the different psychological qualities of leadership needed in different phases of human activity, peace and war being the two extremes. ~ S. Nassir Ghaemi

World will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion ... ~ Jeff Shaara

That investors should be able to take physical possession of the cotton which underpinned the bonds if the South failed to make its interest payments. Collateral is, after all, only good if a creditor can get his hands on it. And that is why the fall of New Orleans in April 1862 was the real turning point in the American Civil War. With the South's main port in Union hands, any investor who wanted to get hold of Southern cotton had to run the Union's naval blockade not once but twice, in and out. ~ Niall Ferguson

It cost about 75 cents to kill a man in Ceasar's time. The price rose to about $3,000 per man during the Napoleonic wars; to $5,000 in the American Civil War; and then to $21,000 per man in World War I. Estimates for the future wars indicate that it may cost the warring countries not less than $50,000 for each man killed. ~ Homer Bone

Be assured, he is not an ordinary man. ~ George Meade

…[W]e have a country here where the past cannot keep a good man in chains, and that's the nature of the war. ~ Michael Shaara

Richmond has fallen - and I have no heart to write about it ... They are too many for us. Everythign lost in Richmond, even our archives. Blue-black is our horizon. ~ Mary Boykin Chesnut

There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War. ~ Gertrude Stein

[David Riesman] had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend. ~ David Halberstam

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. ~ Abraham Lincoln

The pageant has passed. That day is over. But we linger, loath to think we shall see them no more together - these men, these horses, these colors afield. ~ Joshua Chamberlain

The very same British and American families who had combined to wreck the Indian textile industry in the promotion of the opium trade [ ... ] combined to make the trade, a valuable source of revenue. In 1864 they joined forces to create causes for war and to promote the terrible War Between the States, also known as the American Civil War. ~ John Coleman

The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them. ~ Shelby Foote

Frank Zhang, you should know!" Frank flinched. "I should?" "A son of Ares stood here!" Hedge cried indignantly. "I'm Roman ... so Mars, actually." "Whatever! Famous spot in the American Civil War!" "I'm Canadian, actually. ~ Rick Riordan

GENERAL GRANT: "There is only one way to make war, Colonel. You have to HURT somebody. Maybe you have to hurt EVERYBODY. Make them feel it, understand what it is we are doing out here. If this was worth fighting in the first place, then it is worth winning. We cannot win unless we fight. If we fight, men will die. If more of THEM die, then we will win. It has nothing to do with cities, or government, or what is barbaric and what is civilized. We are HERE, and the enemy ois over there, and we must give the newspapers the horrifying truth, then the people will know. If Mr. Lincoln does not want me to win this war, then he can make that decision. But there is no other way to see it. If these men do not fight and bleed and die, if we do not make the rebels quit by destroying their will to fight, by destroying their army, then the only other choice is to walk away. ~ Jeff Shaara

Care for him who shall have borne the battle ~ Abraham Lincoln

The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina on the Florida coast. More than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2 percent of the population, died in it. ~ Bruce Catton

Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came. ~ Abraham Lincoln

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

I hear my father's voice. "Political differences divided what used to be America into The Nationalist States and The Patriot States: Then Nats declared war on the Patriots. Why?"
Olmo answers in an overly enthusiastic tone. "Because they couldn't agree on the division of derritoryes!"
"Territories," corrects Dad.
"That, too," says Olmo cheerfully. ~ Mya Robarts

The people of the city of Savannah within their collective conscience could follow previous examples in history and forgive the atrocities of actual slavery committed against slaves themselves. But what was it [the city] to do with the knowledge that children completely unaware of the greater ramifications of slavery were led to the Civil War slaughter in its name? How does one acknowledge with forgiveness such an unforgiving mutilation of one's own mind, body, soul, and legacy? ~ Aberjhani

The story of the American Civil War is essentially one of human beings––Northerners, Southerners, Blacks, Whites, men, women–– holding themselves accountable for the future of a nation. ~ Aberjhani

The war, the American Civil War of 1861-1865, would never have been possible without the sinister influence of the Jesuits. ~ Abraham Lincoln

From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession. ~ Emmeline Pankhurst

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

What began as a bitter dispute over Union and States' Rights, ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in America. At Gettysburg in 1863, Abraham Lincoln said perhaps more than he knew. The war was about a new birth of freedom. ~ Bruce Catton

Everyone says we have our first African American president. Has there ever been a Jewish president? An Italian president? They don't say a damn thing about that. You think we're still fighting the Civil War or something. If you want to mention it in passing, OK. But don't dwell on it. ~ Monte Irvin

Planters clung to their proslavery beliefs even when there were facts to the contrary because the stakes involved in abandoning them were too high. They could not reject or even compromise their central myths, for to do so would mean condemning a whole culture as a lie...Ideologies, once constructed, have lives of their own. Any evidence which might have contradicted the planters' basic beliefs faced an a priori denial. ~ James L. Roark

Grant stood by me when I was crazy ... ~ William Tecumseh Sherman

The triumph of the Confederacy ... would be a victory for the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the sprits of its friends all over the civilized world ... [The American Civil War] is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs. ~ John Stuart Mill

Like most Rebel soldiers, Sam Watkins owned no slaves. ~ Bruce Catton

One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life. ~ Henry Adams

Consider the great Samuel Clemens. Huckleberry Finn is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read: Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it 'hyper-canonical.' And Twain is a figure in American history as well as in American letters. The only objectors to his presence in the schoolroom are mediocre or fanatical racial nationalists or 'inclusivists,' like Julius Lester or the Chicago-based Dr John Wallace, who object to Twain's use - in or out of 'context' - of the expression 'nigger.' An empty and formal 'debate' on this has dragged on for decades and flares up every now and again to bore us. But what if Twain were taught as a whole? He served briefly as a Confederate soldier, and wrote a hilarious and melancholy account, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. He went on to make a fortune by publishing the memoirs of Ulysses Grant. He composed a caustic and brilliant report on the treatment of the Congolese by King Leopold of the Belgians. With William Dean Howells he led the Anti-Imperialist League, to oppose McKinley's and Roosevelt's pious and sanguinary war in the Philippines. Some of the pamphlets he wrote for the league can be set alongside those of Swift and Defoe for their sheer polemical artistry. In 1900 he had a public exchange with Winston Churchill in New York City, in which he attacked American support for the British war in South Africa and British support for the American war ~ Christopher Hitchens

I'm smarter than Grant; I know more about organization, supply and administration and about everything else than he does; but I'll tell you where he beats me and he beats the world. he don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like hell. ~ Philip Sheridan

I've been reading and researching various aspects of history - Dickens' London, Nelson's sea battles, Magellan's nautical explorations, the weapons and battles and key figures of the American Civil War - for most of my life. I pick up a book here or there or see a documentary or talk with an expert in the subject, and my curiosity about the one area of study and discovery always leads to another. ~ Gary Paulsen

Will the slave fight? If any man asks you, tell him No. But if anyone asks you will a Negro fight, tell him Yes! ~ Wendell Phillips

They rode for a while in silence, a tiny island in the smoky stream of marching men. Then Lee said slowly, in a strange, soft, slow tone of voice, "Soldiering has one great trap."
Longstreet turned to see his face. Lee was riding slowly ahead, without expression. He spoke in that same slow voice. "To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. This is...a very hard thing to do. No other profession requires it. That is one reason why there are so very few good officers. Although there are many good men."
Lee rarely lectured. Longstreet sensed a message beyond it. He waited. Lee said, "We don't fear our own deaths, you and I." He smiled slightly, then glanced away. "We protect ourselves out of military necessity, not do not protect yourself enough and must give thought to it. I need you. But the point is, we are afraid to die. We are prepared for our own deaths, and for the deaths of comrades. We learn that at the Point. But I have seen this happen: we are not prepared for as many deaths as we have to face, inevitably as the war goes on. There comes a time..."
He paused. He had been gazing straight ahead, away from Longstreet. Now, black-eyed, he turned back, glanced once quickly into Longstreet's eyes, then looked away.
"We are never prepared for so many to die. So you understand? No one is. We expect some chosen few. We expect an occasional empty chair, a toast to d ~ Michael Shaara

A son of Ares stood here?" Hedge cried indignantly.
"I'm Roman . . . so Mars, actually."
"Whatever! Famous spot in the American Civil War!"
"I'm Canadian, actually."
"Whatever! . . . ~ Rick Riordan

Despite what the pundits want us to think, contested primaries aren't civil war, they are democracy at work, and that's beautiful. ~ Sarah Palin

Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Pickett excused himself, watchful of Longstreet. Pickett was always saying something to irritate somebody, and he rarely knew why, so his method was simply to apologize in general from time to time and let people know he meant well and then to shove off and hope for the best. He apologized and departed, curls ajiggle. ~ Michael Shaara

Really, Mr. Lincoln, I have had enough of this show business. ~ Ulysses S. Grant

The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The 'civil rights' revolutionary groups are a case in point. Their goal is not equality but power. The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of magic are control and power ... Voodoo or magic was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive. ~ R.J. Rushdoony

Imagine us saying to children: "In the last fifty or so years, the human race has become aware of a great deal of information about its mechanisms; how it behaves, how it must behave under certain circumstances. If this is to be useful, you must learn to contemplate these rules calmly, dispassionately, disinterestedly, without emotion. It is information that will set people free from blind loyalties, obedience to slogans, rhetoric, leaders, group emotions." Well, there it is.
...It is interesting to speculate: what country, what nation, when, and where, would have undertaken a programme to teach its children to be people to resist rhetoric, to examine the mechanisms that govern them? I can think of only one - America in that heady period of the Gettysburg Address. And that time could not have survived the Civil War, for when war starts, countries cannot afford disinterested examination of their behaviour. When a war starts, nations go mad - and have to go mad, in order to survive. ...I am not talking of the aptitudes for killing, for destruction, which soldiers are taught as part of their training, but a kind of atmosphere, the invisible poison, which spreads everywhere. And then people everywhere begin behaving as they never could in peace-time. Afterwards we look back, amazed. Did I really do that? Believe that? Fall for that bit of propaganda? Think that all our enemies were evil? That all our own nation's acts were good? How could I have tolerated that state of mind, ~ Doris Lessing

The two princes stared at each other, one gold and one silver, one her twin and one her soul-bonded. There was nothing friendly in the stares, nothing human - two Fae males locked in some unspoken dominance battle. ~ Sarah J. Maas

The prisoners still keep killing each other thay hung six yesterday thay fight all most every night in the stockade. ~ Joseph Williams

Everything African-Americans - every freedom they have obtained - came from Republicans, not Democrats. All the way back to the Emancipation Proclamation, to the Civil Rights movement. Civil Rights legislation was passed by a Republican Congress. ~ Rafael Cruz

America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes. It is this hope that has sustained us through revolution and civil war, depression and world war, a struggle for civil and social rights and the brink of nuclear crisis. And it is because our dreamers dreamed that we have emerged from each challenge more united, more prosperous, and more admired than before. ~ Barack Obama

Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself, ~ Julian Bond

In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war. ~ Pankaj Mishra

Occasionally, a re-enactment is a fine thing. I love Civil War re-enactments. ~ John Lydon

Whatever else the religious Right may be, it is a bonanza for its opponents ... Reports of the great terror that is upon us are raising millions of dollars in fund appeals by Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, Norman Lear's People for the American Way, and others who claim to believe that the religious Right is the greatest peril to American democracy since Joe McCarthy. ~ Richard John Neuhaus

I don't call myself a white supremacist. I'm a civil rights activist concerned about European-American rights. ~ David Duke

Others, however, perhaps overwhelmed by what they read, say Africa should be written off, that it's beyond repair. My experiences so far say we should put it in perspective. For instance, a new nation that has just won its independence from a colonial power struggles with internal graft and corruption, civil war and economic turbulence - more developed nations see it as a basket-case. Yet 200+ years later it emerges as the world's sole superpower. Yes, America. ~ Kevin Sites

As soon as the war was over, they had to justify what was done. ~ Harry S. Truman

Jealousy is a kind of Civil War in the Soul, where Judgment and Imagination are at perpetual Jars. ~ Various

I'm hoping that you will look at the larger picture and think about what it takes to live ethically in a world in which 18 million people are dying unnecessarily each year. That's a higher annual death rate than in World War II. In the past twenty years alone, it adds up to more deaths than were caused by all the civil and international wars and government repression of the entire twentieth century, the century of Hitler and Stalin. How much would we give to prevent those horrors? Yet how little are we doing to prevent today's even larger toll, and all the misery that it involves? ~ Peter Singer

It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides. ~ Erich Fromm

Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733. ~ Geraldine Brooks

This must be a world of democracy and respect for human rights, a world freed from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation and ignorance, relieved of the threat and the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees. ~ Nelson Mandela

It [freedom] rings bells to remind humanity that the most precious gifts in life––like children and love and time––must never be taken for granted. ~ Aberjhani

The new laws passed by Congress in the name of fighting terrorism pose a greater danger to the civil liberties of American citizens than to the operations of terrorists. Powers once assumed are never relinquished, just as bureaucracies, once created, never die. ~ Charley Reese

The words, gestures, and threats of our officers were thrown away upon men who had lost all presence of mind and only longed for absence of body. ~ Andrew Potter

People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it's a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that's one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does. ~ Shelby Foote

We need to focus on killing the bad guys, not getting stuck in Middle Eastern civil wars that don't keep America safe. ~ Ted Cruz

As long as you are forced to be a woman first instead of a person, by default, you need to be a feminist. That's it. Men are people, women are women? Screw that. Screw that. I am sick of having words aimed to shut me up. I am sick of having to be anything other than a person first. Zounds! I enjoy being a girl, whatever that means. For me, that meant Star Wars figurines, mounds of books, skirts and flats. It meant Civil War reenacting and best girlfriends I'd give a kidney to and best guy friends I'd ruin a liver with and making messes and cleaning up some of them and still not knowing how to apply eye shadow. That's being a girl. That's being a person. It's the same damn thing. I wish Rush had just called me an idiot. I'm happy to be called an idiot! On the day when someone on the Internet calls me an idiot first and ugly second, I will set down my feminist battle flag and heave a great sigh. Then I will pick it back up and keep climbing. There are many more mountains to overcome. ~ Alexandra Petri

Slavery is a memory of something we cannot remember, and yet we cannot forget. ~ Bill T. Jones

Senators from his own party soon began to warn that Obama was secretly expanding the government's surveillance powers even beyond those authorized by Bush. Obama allowed the civil liberties panel that was supposed to provide oversight of the government's war on terror to remain idle and only partially staffed for years. His administration launched a draconian crackdown on the press, spying on reporters while prosecuting more leakers and whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. ~ James Risen

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
as quoted in THE RIVER OF WINGED DREAMS ~ Abraham Lincoln

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you ... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it. ~ Abraham Lincoln

If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves. ~ Michael Shaara

Under the president's spying program, there are no checks and balances. There is no outside review of the legality of this brazen infringement on the civil rights and liberties of the American people. Undeterred by the public outcry, the president [George Bush] vows to continue spying on American citizens. ~ Samuel Alito

After all, I think Forrest was the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman

I think people underestimate the romance audience. It's everything from career women to high school girls to elderly women. I have male readers, too, especially for the Civil War books. ~ Heather Graham Pozzessere

Have you noticed how the Holocaust deniers only ever quibble over the number of Jewish deaths? Now why is that? The answer is very simple: Because they are anti-Semitic. It really is that simple. Anti-Semitism is one of the most aggressive forces on the planet, and has been since Biblical times. Had the Holocaust been a purge of any other race or group of people, everyone would most likely accept the facts. Who, for example, disputes that at least 800,000 Rwandans died in the genocide that occurred during the Rwandan civil war? Or that around 1.7 million Cambodians died in the Cambodian killing fields? ~ James Morcan

Hello fake Everett children. ~ Monet Polny

That in a civil war there is continuous fighting, based on grievences that are forever changing. ~ Nuruddin Farah

YAZIDIS AND CHRISTIANS WANT TO BE FREE OF NIGHT MIST AND BEHEADING DRIFT! ~ Widad Akreyi

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it. ~ Dan Savage

Mars is not an aesthetic God. ~ John Brown Gordon

It's cold enough to freeze the nuts off a brass monkey," Mikey said. The kids giggled. "Mikey said nuts," Nina said. Kate held up a hand, the sign for silence. "The saying comes from the Civil War days, when the cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid formation called a brass monkey. When it got extremely cold outside they'd crack and break off. Breaking the nuts off the brass monkey. Get it? ~ Jill Shalvis

The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time. ~ Jackie Robinson