Guatemalan Civil War Quotes

Why were we so full of hope in those days? Looking back, I see so clearly that violence was worsening. Living through that time, we didn't see that. We believed in our capacity to grow a great country. A just society. ~ Kaimana Wolff

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

Companies aren't families. They're battlefields in a civil war. ~ Charles Duhigg

The Assault Guards had one submachine-gun between ten men and an automatic pistol each; we at the front had approximately one machine-gun between fifty men, and as for pistols and revolvers, you could only procure them illegally. As a matter of fact, though I had not noticed it till now, it was the same everywhere. The Civil Guards and Carabineros, who were not intended for the front at all, were better armed and far better clad than ourselves. I suspect it is the same in all wars-always the same contrast between the sleek police in the rear and the ragged soldiers in the line. ~ George Orwell

Understanding America for the Non-American Black: American Tribalism In America, tribalism is alive and well. There are four kinds - class, ideology, region, and race. First, class. Pretty easy. Rich folk and poor folk. Second, ideology. Liberals and conservatives. They don't merely disagree on political issues, each side believes the other is evil. Intermarriage is discouraged and on the rare occasion that it happens, is considered remarkable. Third, region. The North and the South. The two sides fought a civil war and tough stains from that war remain. The North looks down on the South while the South resents the North. Finally, race. There's a ladder of racial hierarchy in America. White is always on top, specifically White ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Similarly, when Lincoln insisted the Civil War was about the union, not about slavery, this is understood by competent historians to reflect Lincoln's determination to keep border states - Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri - within the union. These states had slavery, and if Lincoln framed the war as one to end slavery, the border states would have seceded. If they seceded, Lincoln believed the union cause was lost. Once again, Lincoln acted in statesmanlike fashion to hold the border states, and he was successful in doing so, thus shortening the war and ending slavery more quickly. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

Some call this civil war; others call it emergency
I call it pure evil. ~ George W. Bush

In the decade before the Civil War various north and south lines of railway were projected and some of these were assisted by grants of land from the Federal Government. ~ John Moody

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

A South Carolina native, Miles was a lawyer, a mayor of Charleston, and a congressman. He was one of his state's "fire-eaters," a term applied to men who openly advocated secession rather than finding accomodation with the Union in the summer and fall of 1860. ~ Clint Johnson

The script was always the most important thing to me and I loved the script. For one thing, I've always admired trees. I just worship them. Think what trees have witnessed, what history, such as living through the Civil War, yet they still survive. ~ Kim Novak

Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

Like many people who live in the South, I'm drawn to the history of the Civil War. ~ Nicholas Sparks

The civil war which has so long prevailed between Spain and the Provinces in South America still continues, without any prospect of its speedy termination. ~ James Monroe

That's one reason why a civil war is worse than any other sort. When two parties in a given country resort to arms to settle political differences, every man is a potential enemy to every other man, and the distinction between legalized killing and murder is not clearly drawn in the minds of average men, who are incapable of sustained thought. Death is held to be a fitting reward for those who dare hold contrary views, and a nation involved in a civil war is a breeding ground for children reared to look with tolerance on next to nothing but violence. ~ Kenneth Roberts

The crisis created by an inability to distinguish the Bible on race from the Bible on slavery meant that when the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished, systemic racism continued unchecked as the great moral anomaly in a supposedly Christian America. ~ Mark A. Noll

Jesse and Frank James were the most well-known military-trained gang members ~ Carter F. Smith

The Civil War was the climax of a tragedy that was preordained from the time of the Revolution. Only with the elimination of slavery could this nation that Jefferson had called "the world's best hope" for democracy even begin to fulfill its great promise. ~ Gordon S. Wood

Among Evangelical Christians, all of whom await the Second Coming of Jesus, there are historically two camps: postmillennialists and premillennialists. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most were of the "post" variety, meaning that they expected the Messiah's return after the thousand-year reign of peace. In order to hasten His arrival, they set out to create that harmonious world here and now, fighting for the abolition of slavery, prohibition of alcohol, public education, and women's literacy.
The chaos of the Civil War and industrialization caused many evangelicals to rethink their optimism. They determined that Jesus would actually arrive before the final judgment. Therefore any efforts toward a just society here on earth were futile; what mattered was perfecting one's faith. As historian Randall Balmer writes, these believers "retreated into a theology of despair, one that essentially ceded the temporal world to Satan and his minions. ~ Mark Sundeen

But my point is these Civil War songs were gruesome. The hatred that's so bad in this country today, and for the past 10 or 15 years, bad as it is, is nothing compared to the kind of things people would write down and sing back in the Civil War. ~ T Bone Burnett

I have defeat tattooed in my DNA. My great-uncle was shot dead. My grandfather was given the death sentence and spent five years in jail. My grandmothers suffered the humiliation of those defeated in the Civil War. My father was put in jail. My mother was politically active in the underground. It bothers me enormously to lose, I can't stand it. And I've spent many years, with some friends, devoting almost all of our political activity to thinking about how we can win. ~ Pablo Iglesias

I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not falter. I know how strongly American civilization now leans on the triumph of the government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. ~ Sullivan Ballou

As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan. ~ Chelsea Manning

You know it's going to be Mary the Maid, or someone like her, and there's going to be two men and she will end up with the nice one, and there has to be misunderstandings, and they never do anything more than kiss and it's absolutely guaranteed that, for example, an exciting civil war or an invasion by trolls or even a scene with any cooking in it is not going to happen. The best you can expect is a thunderstorm. ~ Terry Pratchett

Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." What you end up with is civil war, anarchy. ~ Niall Ferguson

But, sadly, our manly struggle to conform to the slave-like work rhythms of present-day custom has led to the nap being replaced by that costly and damaging drink, coffee. As paracetamol is to the cold, so coffee is to the nap: a way of riding it out, a sort of competition with one's own body, a civil war. When we feel tired after lunch, the socially acceptable solution is to dose up on coffee and ride out the tiredness, rather than simply take a nap. The coffee may produce a temporary perking of the senses, but irritability will follow, not to mention a sleep debt later in the day. You cannot win the battle against sleep. Don't fight, surrender! ~ Tom Hodgkinson

Saladin had the same immediate successor as all the great Muslim leaders of his time: civil war. Barely had he died that his empire was dismembered. ~ Amine Maalouf

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

If you come across someone who isn't cussing in the time of great anguish and distress then you've met the one causing everyone else to cuss." ~ Shellyanna Tidwell Preston.

Quote from the book "Shellyanna ~ A. White

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

In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Grant, aged thirty-nine, with four children at home and scarcely a penny in the bank, had made no mark on the world and looked unlikely to do so, for all the boom conditions of mid-century America. His Plymouth Rock ancestry, his specialist education, his military rank, which together must have ensured him a sheltered corner in the life of the Old World, counted for nothing in the New. He lacked the essential quality to be what Jacques Barzun has called a "booster," one of those bustling, bonhomous, penny-counting, chance-grabbing optimists who, whether in the frenetic commercial activity of the Atlantic coast, in the emergent industries of New England and Pennsylvania or on the westward-moving frontier, were to make America's fortune. Grant, in his introspective and undemonstrative style, was a gentleman, and was crippled by the quality. ~ John Keegan

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom. ~ Abraham Lincoln

I kept seeing turning points. First the uprising. Then the creation of the Free Syrian Army, the FSA. Now a big assassination bombing in the heart of Assad's government. But the turn never came. It just got worse and worse. ~ Richard Engel

Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded. ~ Karl Marx

Sean Penn claimed to be 'serv[ing] the country' by giving aid and comfort to an enemy about to be attacked by the US. He said it made him feel more patriotic to dissent from the war aims of his nation. It is at least a counterintuitive position. Most people would not instantly grasp how it is more patriotic to always root against America. White supremacists should try claiming that burning crosses is more supportive of civil rights than not burning them. ~ Ann Coulter

The terrorists want civil war. Al-Qaida is attacking Shiites. The Shiite militias are taking revenge on the Sunnis. And the Sunnis are become more extremist, with some joining al-Qaida. ~ Zalmay Khalilzad

Christianity ... has produced the iniquities of the Inquisition, the egotism and celibacy of the monasteries, the fury of religious wars, the ferocity of the Hussite, of the Catholic, of the Puritan, of the Spaniard, of the Irish Orangeman and of the Irish Papist; it has divided families, alienated friends, lighted the torch of civil war, and borne the virgin and the greybeard to the burning pile, broken delicate limbs upon the wheel and wrung the souls and bodies of innocent creatures on the rack; all this it has done, and done in the name of God. ~ Ouida

Slavery has become so engrafted into the policy of the Southern States, that it cannot be eradicated without tearing up by the roots their happiness, tranquillity, and prosperity. ~ William Loughton Smith

It is conventional to tell that constitutional story - of a republican failure ending in restoration - but to do so is to limit the significance of the 1640s to that single constitutional queston. There is much more to say, and to remember, about England's decade of civil war and revolution. Political and religious questions of fundamental importance were thrashed out before broad political audiences as activists and opportunists sought to mobilize support for their proposals. The resulting mass of contemporary argument is alluring to the historian since it lays bare the presumptions of a society very alient to our own. At the same time, by exposing those presumptions to sustained critical examination, this public discussion changed them. ~ Michael Braddick

I sometimes say the conflict in the work is the conflict of my own thoughts and anxieties. It's a civil war in my head. The top part [of my artwork] is you letting go and floating. You become part of the air and you've tapped into the heartbeat of the universe. I guess that's what people do when they meditate. ~ Ali Banisadr