Bruce Catton Quotes

25 quotes in 423 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.
• The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the…
• In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time of waiting for a big trip to an unknown destination. The…
• Early youth is a baffling time
• 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…
• I think I was always subconsciously driven by an attempt to restate that faith and to show where it was properly grounded, how it grew…
• Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.
• A singular fact about modern war is that it takes charge. Once begun it has to be carried to its conclusion, and carrying it there…
• 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…
• Beneath everything else, North and West, there ran a profound, unvoiced, almost subconscious conviction that the [American] nation was going to go on growing-in size,…
• Yet there is a dignity in the human spirit which can become most clearly visible in the moment of defeat and disaster.
• Men see things late, and it may be that at times an evil fate drives them on.
• Abraham Lincoln was not all brooding and melancholy and patient understanding. There was a hard core in him, and plenty of toughness. He could recognize…
• 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…
• Progress is the sum of small victories won by individual human beings.
• History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.
• Say this much for big league baseball - it is beyond question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.

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