Bob Newhart Quotes

I've been enjoying 'Life on the Mississippi' by Mark Twain that I picked up at the airport randomly. It's very witty and interesting to read about his time as a steamboat pilot.

America in the 1800s isn't quite the historical mystery hotbed as the same period in the country it bested in the War of Independence, but its unique spectacle of rapid social change and the lingering influence of its literary voices act in a parallel manner upon crime fiction chroniclers devoted to this side of the Atlantic.

My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.

In many ways, being honest about 'Huckleberry Finn' goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

I am a planter - a cotton planter. I am a Southern man and a slaveholder - a kind and a merciful one, I trust - and none the worse for being a slaveholder.

The majority of U.S. high school students don't know within 50 years when the Civil War occurred.

I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently.

The Confederate flag was the flag of the American South during the civil war. It was the flag of people who were fighting against their own government in an attempt to retain slavery. It was the flag of people who thought slavery was no problem, who thought slavery was a good thing.

Like every child growing up in America, I read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' I liked them well enough, but I didn't love them.

Mark Twain's Roughing It is a book that many people don't know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age.

The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.

... rich white leaders of the American South defeated populism in the late 19th century, by persuading poor Whites to hate poor Blacks.

The slave-owning South won the subsequent ideological war…the consensus of history was that the Civil War had little to do with slavery.

I have only 2 regrets: that I have not shot Henry Clay or hanged John C. Calhoun.

I have no hesitation in believing that less than twenty years ago a man would have been mobbed and the printing office torn down for printing and publishing anything like ‘The Emancipator,’ whereas it now meets the approbation of thousands, and is patronized perhaps at least equal to any other in the state. But little by little, times are, much changed here, until societies, of respectable citizens have arisen to plead the cause of abolition; and instead of it being a disgrace to a man to be a member of these societies, it is rather a mark of the goodness of his heart, and redounds to his honor.

Tammany Hall and slavery usually found 'The Herald' on their side.

I'm slightly obsessed with women's history, so I'd love to talk to Emily Dickinson or Louisa May Alcott.

James McBride's 'The Good Lord Bird' is set in the mid-19th century and is based on the real life of John Brown, the one who lies a-mouldering in his grave.

If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.

You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,' but that ain't no matter. That book was made by a Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.

I hate The Confederate cause. I've always felt that they are our Nazis and the rebel flag was our swastika.

The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, "the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in."

The Democratic Party is the - was the largest and most powerful institution supporting slavery in the English-speaking world. And it is the only one that has survived to the 21st century!

Look, see, learn, become a citizen of Mankind, not just Hannibal, Missouri. That is the message of [Mark] Twain.