Stephen Ambrose Quotes

“The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.”

“You cannot kill that city, ... I bet theres people saying, Ive got to go back. ”

“You can take the day off.”

“a great teacher of writing.”

“The copied words they discovered amounted to about 10 pages out of a total work of some 15,000 pages in print, ... The investigative reporters found them by using my footnotes.”

Stephen Ambrose

“The irony here is the man who has done the most to keep these papers from becoming available, Dick Nixon, is the man whos going to benefit the most from them because people are going to start seeing the problems from his point of view.”

Stephen Ambrose

“We voted 50-50 for the next president, ... One of the things that was notable was how much the American people today yearn for a sense of national unity and that brought it about. So there are a lot of things that happened after 12/7/41 that are happening now and will continue to happen, the most important of which is we became one people.”

Stephen Ambrose

“Nearly every artifact has a story connected to it, whether it be a hole in a helmet or a belt that a medic carried around with him as he treated the wounded on the beach.”

Stephen Ambrose

“As a people, we have wrestled with Vietnams legacy for many years, as was and is our duty. Now we want to remind ourselves of what we have done right. Our involvement in World War II was us doing right.”

Stephen Ambrose

War creates many strange juxtapositions, perhaps none stranger than this: men who are doing their utmost to kill other men can transform in a split second into lifesavers. Soldiers who encounter a wounded man (often an enemy) become tender, caring angels of mercy. The urge to kill and the urge to save sometimes run together simultaneously.