H. W. Brands Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von H. W. Brands:

I've been writing big stories of history, but there are a lot of fascinating little stories.

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.

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.

H. W. Brands

With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background.

H. W. Brands

Harry Truman's decision to fire Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War in April 1951 shocked the American political system and astonished the world. Much of the world didn't realize the president had the power to fire a five-star general; much of America didn't realize Truman had the nerve.

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.

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.

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.

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.

H. W. Brands

The Founders were anything but demigods to themselves and their contemporaries, who recognized full well that the experiment in self-government had only begun.

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.

H. W. Brands

The Catalonian movement is quite serious; I don't think it's simply symbolic. I think that they believe that Catalonia can be more successful on its own than as part of Spain.

H. W. Brands

In some ways, I would be absolutely fascinated if Trump gets elected.

H. W. Brands

I've been writing big stories of history, but there are a lot of fascinating little stories.

H. W. Brands

Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man.

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.

H. W. Brands

Our love for the Founders leads us to abandon, and even to betray, the very principles they fought for.

H. W. Brands

When a president doesn't know the policy, it doesn't make for a very effective leader.

H. W. Brands

Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.

H. W. Brands

It's not an exaggeration to say that Texas gets a lot more out of being part of the United States than the United States gets out of having Texas as one of the states.

H. W. Brands

I had long known the story of Aaron Burr, but when I heard about his remarkable daughter, Theodosia, about the relationship between the two and about her tragic disappearance, I knew I wanted to tell their story.

H. W. Brands

The Reagan Revolution has had no second act.

H. W. Brands

Reagan conspired in the underestimation of his own ability.

H. W. Brands

By the early 1960s, there was a moral consensus on what needed to be done on civil rights.

H. W. Brands

It's hard to say that Trump actually has a health care policy.

H. W. Brands

President Trump is doing what he can to act decisively. And if there's one thing most people have in mind in distinguishing the business world from the political world is that the CEO of a business can act decisively.

H. W. Brands

Members of Congress are somewhat reluctant to tangle with a president who seems to have the backing of the American people.

H. W. Brands

America can change its presidents, but the world doesn't change.

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.

H. W. Brands

Reagan gave essentially the same speech from the beginning to the end of his political career, which was always, 'The American people are great, the government always screws things up, let's get the government out of the way.' On the foreign policy side it was, 'Communism is bad, and we're going to defeat it.'

H. W. Brands

The race question in America has often been about race, but it has equally often been about power.

H. W. Brands

If - heaven forbid - a shooter did come into my class, I wouldn't want to have to worry about getting caught in a crossfire.

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.

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.

H. W. Brands

Reagan has been deified by the Republican Party, which is odd. The Reagan that modern Republicans revere is not the real Reagan.

H. W. Brands

Although this should not be so, historians reconsider presidencies based on how the presidents conduct themselves after leaving office.

H. W. Brands

I'm often asked, 'Why didn't Benjamin Franklin ever become president?' My short, easy answer is: He died.

H. W. Brands