Douglas Brinkley Quotes

I'm not a historian who thinks Confederate memorials should be boarded up.

Stubbornness is a positive quality of presidential leadership - if you're right about what you're stubborn about.

History will remember the Superdome debacle - caused by the dearth of evacuation buses - as "Nagin's Folly," mayoral incompetence of the first order.

Nixon was always willing to be bipartisan, so there are a lot of surprises in the man.

I'm not a partisan.

Rosa Parks' entire career has been one as working as a civil rights activist.

The superhighway of celebrity and showmanship is filled with debris.

While the scars of the monstrous Civil War still remain, the wounds have closed since 1865, in large part, because of the civility of Grant and Lee.

Animals interest me more than anything else.

There is nobody that's ever going to fill Ted Kennedy's shoes, and that's a tall order for somebody in the family to try to live up to.

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

For Dylan, it seems, life is always the next gig. Changing pace and location are essential to his survival as an artist.

Walter Cronkite had a golden rule for all wartime reporters: never self-aggrandize.

In Austin, the eco-capital of Texas, residents tend to favor native plants and wildflowers to the sculpted lawns of the Palm Springs variety.

Hurricane Katrina is without question the worst natural disaster in American history,.

Knievel seemed braver and more brazen - and more unhinged - than any other athlete-cum-thrill-seeker of his era.

Reagan was a pure liberation, free-and-fair election American.

Now I'm the father of three children; I'm not able to go live on a bus and do semesters around the country like I did when I was young.

One of the things I learned in editing 'The Reagan Diaries' is to never say what Reagan would do, because he surprised people.

When he (Walter Cronkite) drank, he had an appetite for both history and political bullshit.

John Kerry only went to prep schools because he had an aunt who had the money to pay for his way into those prep schools.

Politicians wanted to mine the Grand Canyon for zinc and copper, and Theodore Roosevelt said, 'No.'

Richard Kerry not only was a pilot in World War II, but was a civil servant. He did not come from money.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

John Kerry can be absolutely ruthless. I would not want to be on his enemies list when he's ready to go after you.

Most Americans didn't distinguish fame from accomplishment.

Cronkite is not a genius at anything except being straight, honest, and normal.

The myth-making about Appomattox started from the moment Lee left the courthouse on his horse to travel to Richmond.

The answer to New Orleans's levee woes is painfully obvious: money and willpower.

survival of the fittest" - which was first coined by the economist Herbert Spencer

If life were fattening, Walter Cronkite would weigh 500 pounds.

Theodore Roosevelt had been enthralled with the idea of Texas since 1883, when he arrived in the Dakota Territory to ranch cattle.

I have a lot of books I want to write.

Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie.

John McPhee's 1989 book The Control of Nature, for

He followed an ironclad rule. He NEVER WATCHED HIMSELF.

It is a long revisionist road up from the bottom for George W. Bush. He is ranked toward the bottom rung of presidents.

I was stunned to find out there had never been a serious, scholarly biography ever written on Rosa Parks.

Unlike most fine writers, he wasn't in love with his own words.

Cronkite was always one step short of disillusionment.

I feel like I'm always learning from people.

As a composer, Dylan now fits comfortably alongside George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, though he grumpily refuses to wear any man's collar.

I learned more about history and literature in the used bookstores in DC than in college libraries.

There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.

History chalks up Mr. McKinley's War as a U.S. win, and he also polls favorably as a 'near great' president.