Stephen E. Ambrose Quotes

In Jefferson’s day, it took six weeks to move information from the Mississippi River to Washington, D.C. In Lincoln’s, information moved over the same route by telegraph all but instantaneously.

Speirs was an officer with a reputation. Slim, fairly tall, dark hair, stern, ruggedly handsome, he cultivated the look of a leader, and acted it.

No war can be won without young men dying. Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.

The Enlightenment taught that observation unrecorded was knowledge lost.

The answer was simple and direct, as it had been throughout the period of white contact with the red men. First, make them dependent. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark saw this in a flash after their initial encounter with the Sioux, of whom they said, “These are the vilest miscreants of the savage race, and must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri, until such measures are pursued, by our government, as will make them feel a dependence on its will for their supply of merchandise.”22 All that would then be needed to put the Indian on the road to civilization was, in the words of Henry Knox, the Secretary of War in 1789, to give the Indian “a love for exclusive property.”23

There are trees growing in Philadelphia (at Fourth and Spruce Streets) and the University of Virginia (at Morea, a guest house) today that grew from the cuttings Lewis sent.14 And as historian Michael Brodhead notes, this was the beginning of “a rich, almost uniquely American phenomenon: the military naturalist.

When Hitler declared war on the United States, he was betting that German soldiers, raised up in the Hitler Youth, would always out fight American soldiers, brought up in the Boy Scouts. He lost that bet. The Boy Scouts had been taught how to figure their way out of their own problems.

At the hangars, each jumpmaster was given two packs of papers, containing an order of the day from Eisenhower and a message from Colonel Sink, to pass around to the men. “Tonight is the night of nights,” said Sink’s. “May God be with

All that existed was precious in Crazy Horse’s religion — whatever a man did or thought was good, was wakan, so long as he obeyed his own inner voice, for that too was wakan.

The looting was profitable, fun, low-risk, and completely in accord with the practice of every conquering army since Alexander the Great’s time.

Comrades are closer than friends, closer than brothers. Their relationship is different from that of lovers.

"There was no room on this new road for Crazy Horse, the greatest warrior of them all. Perhaps Touch-the-Clouds had this in mind as he looked down on those courageous, confused people. "It s well," he said quietly, reassuringly. "He has looked for death and it has come." The Oglalas filed away, silently, into the night."

There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

Over the next two months Eisenhower labored

There are trees growing in Philadelphia (at Fourth and Spruce Streets) and the University of Virginia (at Morea, a guest house) today that grew from the cuttings Lewis sent.