Stephen E. Ambrose Quotes

"In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ranney wrote: "In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I'm treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?'
No,'" I answered, 'but I served in a company of heroes."

Pvt. Robert Fruling said he spent two and a half days at Pointe-du-Hoc, all of it crawling on his stomach. He returned on the twenty-fifth anniversary of D-Day “to see what the place looked like standing up” (Louis Lisko interview, EC).

Third, the Sioux did not delegate real power to an individual, be he a head of an akicita society, tribal chief, or simply a brave individual. As Lowie puts it, “in normal times the chief was not a supreme executive, but a peacemaker and an orator.” Chiefs — all chiefs — were titular, “and any power exercised within the tribe was exercised by the total body of responsible men who had qualified for social eminence by their war record and their generosity.”33 Whites could never understand this point, incidentally; because they could not conceive of a society without a solid hierarchy, the whites insisted that the Indians had to have chiefs who would be a final authority and able to speak for the entire tribe. Later, much difficulty grew out of this basic white misunderstanding of Indian government.

Each man in his own way had gone through what Richard Winters experienced: a realization that doing his best was a better way of getting through the Army than hanging around with the sad excuses for soldiers they met in the recruiting depots or basic training. They wanted to make their Army time positive, a learning and maturing and challenging experience.

As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am conpelled to beleive differently.

The author of the Declaration of Independence threw up his hands at the questions of women’s rights…Jefferson‘s attitude toward women was at one with that of the white men of his age. He wrote about almost everything, but almost never about women, not his wife or his mother and certainly not Sally Hemmings…In America, Jefferson noted with approval, women knew their place, which was in the home and, more specifically, in the nursery. Instead of gadding frivolously about town as Frenchwomen did, chasing fashion or meddling in politics, American women were content with “the tender and tranquil amusement of domestic life” and never troubled their pretty heads about politics.

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

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.

Nor did the Americans find it necessary to wage a ruthless campaign. As has been mentioned previously, both sides respected

In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ranney wrote: “In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I’m treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, ‘Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?’ “ ‘No,’ I answered, ‘but I served in a company of heroes.

That extra special, elite, close feeling started under the stress Capt. Sobel created at Camp Toccoa. Under that stress, the only way the men could survive was to bond together. Eventually, the noncoms had to bond together in a mutiny.

Hitler had a bet that his youth, deliberately raised for this moment in his totalitarian society, would outfight the soft, spoiled children of democracy. Hitler lost that bet.

Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.

The first man stepped up to the open door. All the men had been ordered to look out at the horizon, not straight down, for obvious psychological reasons.

f-word. It substituted for adjectives, nouns, and verbs. It was used, for example, to describe the cooks: “those f — — ers,” or “f — — ing cooks”; what they did: “f — — ed it up again”; and what they produced. David Kenyon Webster, a Harvard English major, confessed that he found it difficult to adjust to the “vile, monotonous, and unimaginative language.” The language made these boys turning into men feel tough and, more important, insiders, members of a group. Even Webster got used to it, although never to like it.