“Americans Never Quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We Make History.-John McCain”

“Without our artists and storytellers, we have no history, and without history your future is unmoored -- we drift. It is art, never war, that carries culture forward.”

“Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.”

“We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories.”

“We all thought Richmond, protected as it was by our splendid fortifications and defended by our army of veterans, could not be taken. Yet Grant turned his face to our Capital, and never turned it away until we had surrendered. Now, I have carefully searched the military records of both ancient and modern history, and have never found Grant's superior as a general. I doubt that his superior can be found in all history.”

“Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment,...We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history or the world - or make it the last.”