John C. Calhoun Quotes

You know how absurd is the fiction put forward by our enemies in the Northern states that the great Civil War which raged between 1861 and 1865 would never have taken place but for Jefferson Davis and myself. Such mighty convulsions, which amount indeed to revolutions, are never the work of individuals, but of divided nations.

The only safety of the South from abolition universal is to be found in an early dissolution of the Union

The Civil War still remains the crossroads of our being.

Each day threatens to engulf us in a veritable civil war... This is how things now stand gentlemen. The time has come for the Nation to make clear whether it desires to follow the way of the rebels [Kmer Rouge], or to continue in the path that I have traced.

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

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.

A mighty influence is abroad, surging and heaving the world.

A reckless and unprincipled tyrant has invaded your soil. Abraham Lincoln, regardless of all moral, legal, and constitutional restraints, has thrown his abolition hosts among you, who are murdering and imprisoning your citizens, confiscating and destroying your property, and committing other acts of violence and outrage too shocking and revolting to humanity to be enumerated. All rules of civilized warfare are abandoned...

The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at length produced its natural effects.

Syria is already in the grips of a civil war, unfortunately enough, and Egypt is moving in that direction. We would like to see the Egyptian people avoid this fate.

I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

When you scan the globe's hot spots, every civil war and massacre, every act of terror and every clash between states has its unique local circumstances.

If Lincoln is among history's truly great men, he didn't achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln's destiny.

There were three causes that accounted for the proclamation of martial law in Poland. First it was the progressing economic ruin of the country. Second, it was the decomposition of the functioning of the state. And third, a threat of a civil war.

We can only imagine the history of the free world today if, at the end of the Civil War, there had been two countries: the United States and the Confederate States of America.

In 'The Hunger Games,' in most people's idea, in terms of rebellion or a civil-war situation, that would meet the criteria for a necessary war. These people are oppressed, their children are being taken off and put in gladiator games. They're impoverished, they're starving, they're brutalized.

Prior to the Civil War, most libraries were either privately owned or housed in universities or churches.

President Abraham Lincoln never lost his ardor for the United States to remain united during the Civil War.

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.

My mom was a history teacher, so I couldn't really avoid history when I was growing up. But we're very light on American history. We don't really have great opportunities to study both the Civil War and the Revolution.

My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.

We are losing each day an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.

A Failure in this Duty did once involve our Nation in all the Horrors of Rebellion and Civil War.

With one terrible exception, the Civil War, law and the Constitution have kept America whole and free.

The middle of 'America's Women' is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency.