Top 40 Bruce Catton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.”

— Bruce Catton

2. “The 1860 election became a referendum on the southern way of life.”

— Bruce Catton

3. “History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.”

— Bruce Catton

4. “To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it – this is a hard lesson.”

— Bruce Catton

5. “Because of that final sentence, no Confederate soldier, from Lee on down, could ever be prosecuted for treason; in effect, this was a general amnesty. There could never be a proscription list to poison the peace with the spirit of vengeance and hatred. Grant had ruled it out.”

— Bruce Catton

6. “In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time of waiting for a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning limited and age waits for the night train.”

— Bruce Catton

7. “Progress is the sum of small victories won by individual human beings.”

— Bruce Catton

8. “Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.”

— Bruce Catton

9. “The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina on the Florida coast. More than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2 percent of the population, died in it.”

— Bruce Catton

10. “If the hardtack got moldy it was usually thrown away as inedible, but if it just got weevily it was issued anyway. Heating it at the fire would drive the weevils out; more impatient soldiers simply ate it in the dark and tried not to think about it.”

— Bruce Catton

11. “And there is the headlight, shining far down the track, glinting off the steel rails that, like all parallel lines, will meet in infinity, which is after all where this train is going.”

— Bruce Catton

12. “There is no other legend quite like the legend of the Confederate fighting man. He reached the end of his haunted road long ago. He fought for a star-crossed cause and in the end he was beaten, but as he carried his slashed red battle flag into the dusky twilight of the Lost Cause he marched straight into a legend that will live as long as the American people care to remember anything about the American past. – Bruce Catton.”

— Bruce Catton

13. “There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect.”

— Bruce Catton

14. “Like most Rebel soldiers, Sam Watkins owned no slaves.”

— Bruce Catton

15. “Abraham Lincoln was not all brooding and melancholy and patient understanding. There was a hard core in him, and plenty of toughness. He could recognize a revolutionary situation when he saw one, and he could act fast and ruthlessly to meet it.”

— Bruce Catton

16. “Yet there is a dignity in the human spirit which can become most clearly visible in the moment of defeat and disaster.”

— Bruce Catton

17. “There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect. It is slack-jawed, with leering eyes and loose wet lips, with heavy feet and ponderous cunning hands; now and then, when something tickles it, it guffaws, and when it is made angry it snarls; and it can be aroused much more easily than it can be quieted. Mike.”

— Bruce Catton

18. “Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.”

— Bruce Catton

19. “Out of Bull Run would come an effort so prodigious that simply to make it would change America forever. In the dust and smoke along the Warrenton Road an era had come to an end.”

— Bruce Catton

20. “A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence.”

— Bruce Catton

21. “Shiloh had as many casualties as Waterloo, and yet there were another 20 Waterloos to come.”

— Bruce Catton

22. “The enduring realization that when a great challenge comes, the most ordinary people can show that they value something more than they value their own lives. When the last of the veterans had gone, and the sorrows and bitterness which the war created had at last worn away, this memory remained.”

— Bruce Catton

23. “The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you.”

— Bruce Catton

24. “We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and devoted to their country, still they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.23.”

— Bruce Catton

25. “His soldiers and the country might have been better off if Burnside had been more of a quitter, but that was one defect which he lacked.”

— Bruce Catton

26. “A nation, from internal resources alone, carrying on for over eighteen months the most gigantic war of modern times, ever increasing in its magnitude, yet all this while growing richer and more prosperous!”1.”

— Bruce Catton

27. “Early youth is a baffling time.”

— Bruce Catton

28. “Say this much for big league baseball – it is beyond question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.”

— Bruce Catton

29. “From first to last the Army of the Potomac was unlucky. It fought for four years, and it took more killing, proportionately, than any army in American history, and its luck was always out; it did its level best and lost; when it won the victory was always clouded by a might-have-been, and when at last the triumph came at Appomattox there were so very, very many of its men who weren’t there to see it.”

— Bruce Catton

30. “Men see things late, and it may be that at times an evil fate drives them on.”

— Bruce Catton

31. “Kearny had probably seen more fighting than any man on the field. He had served in Mexico as a cavalry captain; had remarked, in youthful enthusiasm, that he would give an arm to lead a cavalry charge against the foe. He got his wish, at the exact price offered, a few days later, leading a wild gallop with flashing sabers and losing his left arm. He once told his servant: “Never lose an arm; it makes it too hard to put on a glove.”

— Bruce Catton

32. “I think I was always subconsciously driven by an attempt to restate that faith and to show where it was properly grounded, how it grew out of what a great many young men on both sides felt and believed and were brave enough to do.”

— Bruce Catton

33. “To one point of view war meant boom times, intense activities, and good money in the pocket; to another it meant slow death for sacred American ideals. And to still another it meant personal opportunity, with sure advantage coming to him who was canny enough to play the angles correctly.”

— Bruce Catton

34. “Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other and killed each other in great numbers – if only to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive of how that was possible.”

— Bruce Catton

35. “Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.”

— Bruce Catton

36. “Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall farther to reach it.”

— Bruce Catton

37. “In the four years of its existence the Army of the Potomac had to atone for the errors of its generals on many a bitter field. This happened so many times – it was so normal, so much the regular order of things for this unlucky army – that it is hardly possible to take the blunders which marred its various battles and rank them in the order of magnitude of their calamitous stupidity.”

— Bruce Catton

38. “For untaught soldiers it was rough, and men fought blindly, not knowing what they were doing; an officer came on one man who was loading his musket feverishly, firing straight up into the air, reloading and firing again, an automaton acting entirely by blind instinct.”

— Bruce Catton

39. “Nobody was ready for it, and nobody could quite understand it now that it was happening. But somehow it was being determined that democracy henceforth, perhaps for some centuries to come, would operate through a new instrument. Sovereignty of the states was dying, North as well as South, and going with it was the ancient belief that the government which governs least is the government which governs best.”

— Bruce Catton

40. “The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to that of the United States.”

— Bruce Catton

41. “And so that generation was deprived of the one element that is essential to the operation of a free society-the ability to assume, in the absence of good proof to the contrary, that men in public life are generally decent, honorable, and loyal.”

— Bruce Catton

42. “Be brave, be orderly, and if any man or woman stand in your way, blow them to hell with a chunk of cold lead.” The sheriff then led the posse into town and the fun began.”

— Bruce Catton

43. “They were learning the reality of war, these youngsters, getting face to face with the sickening realization that men get killed uselessly because their generals are stupid, so that desperate encounters where the last drop of courage has been given serve the country not at all and make a patriot look a fool.”

— Bruce Catton

44. “But the miracle of the spirit which takes thousands of young men, ties them together in strange self-forgetfulness, and enables them to walk steadfastly and without faltering into the certainty of pain and death was wearing very thin.”

— Bruce Catton

45. “Haupt’s head swam at the thought of dumping this howling mob down on a battlefield. Orders were orders, to be sure, but he was enough of an army man to know that there are ways and ways of rendering obedience. He delayed the train as long as he could; then, when he finally sent it off, he wired the officer in command at Fairfax Station to arrest all who were drunk.”

— Bruce Catton

46. “Like most presidents, Lincoln was forever being given dramatic compositions by men in high positions with the assurance that his signature at the foot of the paper, his nod of approval to the man who had written it, would solve everything and enable him to sleep quietly of nights.”

— Bruce Catton

47. “They were teaching Hunt the lesson which artillerists have to learn anew in each generation – that a bombardment which will destroy buildings will not necessarily keep brave defenders from fighting on amid the wreckage.”

— Bruce Catton