History Quotes
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George W. Bush has shown himself to be a decent guy, not exploiting his former office to make top dollars giving speeches.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
President Obama ran a campaign in 2008 that was entirely expected from a non-incumbent. You promise, and you imply that if you elect me, everything good is going to happen.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
If the incumbent or his party has been discredited sufficiently, the challenger can run a successful, content-free campaign.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
If you put on the military uniform, you're a prima facie hero. Generals are the epitome of that. They're the ones who have been most successful at the soldier's trade.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The shelf life of a seventh-year State of the Union address is about five minutes. Presidents can propose stuff. They're probably not likely to get it done.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I cannot think of a president or administration that has taken seriously the 100 days.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I'm more inclined to say the presidency has changed Trump rather than Trump changed the presidency. He has moderated or reversed himself on most of the positions he took as a candidate. Reality has set in, as it does with every new president.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Once you become president, you don't even have to stop for red lights. And if it looks like traffic's too bad, you just take a helicopter.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The president is the one person who potentially could be the unifying figure in the country. And if the president or a presidential candidate basically writes off 40 states, then how in the world do the people in those 40 states feel like they have a stake in that person or that election?
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Booker Washington was branded an accommodationist by many of the people who criticized him.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Members of Congress are somewhat reluctant to tangle with a president who seems to have the backing of the American people.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Presidents have to decide what their popularity is for. Lyndon Johnson probably understood best that political popularity is a wasting asset. You had to use it when you had it.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I had this grand plan for writing the history of the United States in six volumes. This was in the mid-1990s; I was fairly young and very ambitious. I pitched it to a publisher, who just laughed at me.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Reagan's enduring value as a conservative icon stems from his resolute preaching of the conservative gospel, in words that still warm the hearts of the most zealous conservatives. Yet Reagan's value as a conservative model must begin with recognition of his flexibility in the pursuit of his conservative goals.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I'm often asked, 'Why didn't Benjamin Franklin ever become president?' My short, easy answer is: He died.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
He used humor more effectively than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Reagan was not an especially warm person, but he appeared to be. Many people disliked his policies, but almost no one disliked him.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I've probably written some books - I know I've written some books that were more interesting to me than to a large audience, but that was mostly when I was first getting started in academia and writing for a narrow audience.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
There is a certain kind of sobering, civilizing effect that being president imposes on people. There is a certain kind of dignity with which you comport yourself. As an observer of the presidency, I have to wonder if Trump would follow that pattern.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Presidents are evaluated not by what they did by the stroke of their own pen; it's what they persuade Congress to do.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The more of my readers I encounter who say, often apologetically, that they are actually listeners, the more I write for the ear rather than the eye. Small things like identifying speakers in dialogue rather than relying on paragraphing to mark the shifts.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Booker Washington was essentially the head Republican boss in the South. He was a power broker.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I certainly don't think that the heirs of the American Revolution were a particularly noble class.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Although this should not be so, historians reconsider presidencies based on how the presidents conduct themselves after leaving office.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Reagan refused to demonize his foes. Instead he charmed them, with a few exceptions, including Tip O'Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House and the embodiment of the liberalism Reagan sought to reverse.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
It wasn't the smiling Trump that people elected. It was the frowning, glowering, angry Donald Trump that people elected.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
With my students, I always have to sell my subject because I know when you're 19, 20 years old, you've got other things on your mind besides American history. What I have to do is make this as compelling as possible.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
By the early 1960s, there was a moral consensus on what needed to be done on civil rights.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The race question in America has often been about race, but it has equally often been about power.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Reagan is the subject of ongoing political debate, and a lot of liberals don't want to take Reagan any more seriously than they did when he was president. I understand why they don't, but they should.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
In the academic world, biographies of these great figures of the past fell out of favor in the 1960s, when there was a turn toward social history, which meant the history of the voiceless and faceless. But the public at large never embraced the idea that these dead white guys should be abandoned.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Previous candidates who get elected are almost always sobered by the office and the responsibility they take on. Donald Trump shows no evidence of that. He's the same Trump that he was when he was host of his reality TV show. He's the same Trump that he was when he was a candidate.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
You can always find people, ordinary people, who will support your particular view, so it becomes a politics of personality, especially at the presidential level. People often go for somebody that they like or somebody that they can identify with.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
You might say presidents are drafting the first chapter of their memoirs in these seventh-year State of the Union addresses. They're trying to get the public and the media to think about their presidencies in the way that they would like to have them thought of.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Some years ago, I read Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution, and I was very taken by the way he told the story, and it seemed as though I was right in the middle of things. And it took me a while to figure out how he achieved that effect, and one of the ways was to write it in the present tense.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The American political system is based on the president taking the initiative and Congress responding. With President Trump, it's been the opposite.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I'm the farthest thing from a bibliophile. I purge my collection regularly: If I haven't read a book in a couple of years, I try to give it to someone who will.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
For Andrew Jackson, politics was very personal. He hated not just the federal debt. He hated debt at all.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Everything that happens today is like something in the past, but it's also unlike things in the past. We never know until an event happens if it's the similarities or differences that matter more.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The president of the United States from the 1940s until 2017 was considered the leader of the free world - probably the most powerful person in the world - not simply in terms of America's military might but in terms of the moral authority of the president. Donald Trump has largely abdicated that.
Quote by -H. W. Brands