Top 90 Stephen E. Ambrose Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Who today is willing to say that Texas and California and the remainder of the Southwest would be better off if they were governed by Mexico?”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

52. “The medics were the most popular, respected, and appreciated men in the company. Their weapons were first-aid kits, their place on the line was wherever a man called out that he was wounded.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

53. “Writing is not the easiest way to make a living. Your work long hours, usually all by yourself. It is not a way to make money.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

54. “That evening, the first Americans ever to enter Montana, the first ever to see the Yellowstone, the Milk, the Marias, and the Great Falls, the first Americans ever to kill a grizzly, celebrated their nation’s twenty-ninth birthday.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

55. “But it was all a pipe dream. As well try to stop an avalanche as to stop the moving frontier. American immigrants and emigrants wanted their share of land – free land – a farm in the family – the dream of European peasants for hundreds of years – the New World’s great gift to the old. Moving west with the tide were the hucksters, the lawyers, merchants, and other men on the make looking for the main chance, men who could manufacture a land warrant in the wink of an eye. This.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

56. “The looting was profitable, fun, low-risk, and completely in accord with the practice of every conquering army since Alexander the Great’s time.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

57. “Trial by jury. Live wherever you can make a living. How could a government based on such principles fail?”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

58. “Lieutenant Welsh remembered walking around among the sleeping men, and thinking to himself that ’they had looked at and smelled death all around them all day but never even dreamed of applying the term to themselves. They hadn’t come here to fear. They hadn’t come to die. They had come to win.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

59. “Both Custer and Crazy Horse, in short, still had much to learn about each other.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

60. “The Canadians have managed to live peacefully with their Indians. It is disgrace that the United States has not done the same.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

61. “Washington, not Jefferson, freed his slaves upon his death.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

62. “Despite himself, Webster was drawn to the people. “The Germans I have seen so far have impressed me as clean, efficient, law-abiding people,” he wrote his parents on April 14. They were churchgoers. “In Germany everybody goes out and works and, unlike the French, who do not seem inclined to lift a finger to help themselves, the Germans fill up the trenches soldiers have dug in their fields. They are cleaner, more progressive, and more ambitious than either the English or the French.”1.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

63. “Oftentimes the fascinating thing is that people who are seen as commanding figures at the moment that they were considered for President and did not run turned out to be treated by history as much more minor figures politically.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

64. “There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

65. “My first book was the book that changed my life.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

66. “As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am conpelled to beleive differently.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

67. “Dumas Malone says it perfectly: “Jefferson’s vision extended farther and comprehended more than that of anybody else in public life, and, thinking of himself as working for posterity, he was more concerned that things should be well started than that they be quickly finished.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

68. “My favorite book is the last one printed, which is always better than those that were published earlier.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

69. “I firmly believe that only a combat soldier has the right to judge another combat soldier.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

70. “The men of Easy Company lined the rails to see the Statue of Liberty slip astern. For nearly every one of them, it was his first trip outside the United States. A certain homesickness set in, coupled with a realization, as the regimental scrapbook Currahee put it, of “how wonderful the last year had been.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

71. “Comrades are closer than friends, closer than brothers. Their relationship is different from that of lovers.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

72. “Before lying down, Winters later wrote in his diary, “I did not forget to get on my knees and thank God for helping me to live through this day and ask for his help on D plus one.” And he made a promise to himself: if he lived through the war, he was going to find an isolated farm somewhere and spend the remainder of his life in peace and quiet.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

73. “If you want to be a hero, the Germans will make one out of you real quick – dead!”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

74. “Discipline won’t do it, because discipline relies on punishment, and there is no punishment the Army can inflict on a front-line soldier worse than putting him into the front line.3.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

75. “I had come to take Roosevelt for granted,” Webster wrote his parents, “like spring and Easter lilies, and now that he is gone, I feel a little lost.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

76. “Is it accidental that so many ex-paratroopers from E company became teachers? Perhaps for some men a period of violence and destruction at one time attracts them to look for something creative as a balance in another part of life. We seem also to have a disproportionate number of builders of houses and other things in the group we see at reunions.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

77. “The replacements, eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds fresh from the States, were wide-eyed. Although the veterans were only a year or two older, they looked terrifying to the recruits.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

78. “There is not a day that has passed since that I do not thank Adolf Hitler for allowing me to be associated with the most talented and inspiring group of men that I have ever known.” Every member of Easy interviewed by this author for this book said something similar.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

79. “You lead by fear or you lead by example. We were being led by fear.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

80. “Winters, Matheson, Nixon, and the others existed,” Private Rader remembered. “These were first-class people, and to think these men would care and share their time and efforts with us seemed a miracle. They.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

81. “They knew fear together. Not only the fear of death or wound, but the fear that all this was for nothing.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

82. “Adding to the problems of frustration and anger caused by the point system was the combination of too much liquor, too many pistols, and too many captured vehicles. Road accidents were almost as dangerous to the 101st in Austria as the German Army had been in Belgium. In the first three weeks in Austria, there were seventy wrecks, more in the six weeks of June and July. Twenty men were killed, nearly 100 injured.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

83. “The businessmen spoke little and did much, while the politicians did as little as possible and spoke much.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

84. “We can’t make you do anything, but we can make you wish you had.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

85. “They were returning to Mourmelon, but not to the barracks. This time they were billeted in large green twelve-man wall tents, about a mile outside what Webster called “the pathetically shabby garrison village of Mourmelon, abused by soldiers since Caesar’s day, consisting of six bars, two whorehouses, and a small Red Cross club.” In Webster’s scathing judgment, “Mourmelon was worse than Fayetteville, North Carolina.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

86. “That extra special, elite, close feeling started under the stress Capt. Sobel created at Camp Toccoa. Under that stress, the only way the men could survive was to bond together. Eventually, the noncoms had to bond together in a mutiny.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

87. “But a choice made is made, it cannot be changed. Things happened as they happened. It is possible to imagine all kinds of different routes across the continent, or a better way for the government to help private industry, or maybe to have the government build and own it. But those things didn’t happen, and what did take place is grand. So we admire those who did it – even if they were far from perfect – for what they were and what they accomplished and how much each of us owes them.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

88. “He generated maximum anxiety over matters of minimum significance.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

89. “The experiences of men in combat produces emotions stronger than civilians can know, emotions of terror, panic, anger, sorrow, bewilderment, helplessness, uselessness, and each of these feelings drained energy and mental stability.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

90. “When the shooting started, they wanted to look up to the guy beside them, not down.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

91. “All this was part of the initiation rites common to all armies. So was learning to drink. Beer, almost exclusively, at the post PX, there being no nearby towns. Lots of beer. They sang soldiers’ songs. Toward.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose

92. “Paul Fussell, in his book Wartime, has the best definition:.”

— Stephen E. Ambrose