George Saunders Quotes

My God, is it possible that all the people have gone mad? The civil war now being inaugurated will be as horrible as his Satanic Majesty could desire.

Death created the modern American union, not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments. The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.

Something is wanting, and something must be done, or we shall be involved in all the horror of failure, and civil war without a prospect of its termination.

The Civil War always moves me.

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

If nothing happens, if we just keep doing what we're doing, tomorrow is not certain. We will see families killing each other. We will see chaos in the country. The day after tomorrow will disappear.... The next civil war in Burundi will absolutely be over land.

As soon as external wars have ceased the internal commence

Revolutions rarely end up as positively as they begin.

Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us.

The American Civil War was the wrangling of two armed mobs.

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end.

It is almost inconceivable that citizens of that time were willing to support so bloody a war, by putting so high a price upon Union and Liberty.

There were 315,000 slave owners in the Union Army (with 200,000 in the Confederate Army) and the men who walked away from the Union Army were adamantly opposed to freeing slaves. We cite these facts and recorded statistics to point out that the principal cause of the war was not the issue of slavery.

Clanless, lawless, homeless is he who is in love with civil war, that brutal ferocious thing.

War is the most readily available form of chaos.

I can't imagine what it would be to be president when the United States at war with yourself. People killing each other here in America on a massive basis. Just can't imagine what it would be.

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.

Some of the inspirations I had as far as following that story would be, like, say, "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly," the way they use the Civil War in that, or even the idea that - the movie that Leone was going to do before he died was going to be a movie about the battle of Stalingrad.

You'd have civil war. You'd have a race war in this country.

A lot of wars are fought between black and whites daily in America. But if it's something I want to be with, the people who started it were black, I wouldn't not get in it.

The Civil War was fought, in a sense, over whether that sentence - all men are created equal - is to be taken literally. And the southerners in the 1850s argued that it was not.

Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning.

After all, I think Forrest was the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side.

Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.

In June 1968, five days before my mother's forty -sixth birthday, the world fell apart again. Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy, who died the next day. Why were people shooting all the Kennedys? Had the country gone mad?