Kenneth C. Davis > Quotes

“How strong is a faith that can't stand up to a few honest questions?”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About the Bible: Everything You Need to Know About the Good Book but Never Learned

“Memorizing information is valuable but only if you're able to make some sense of the information and put it into a useful context. Isn't it much better if we can attach something tangible to that information?”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About Geography: Everything You Need to Know About the World but Never Learned

“The following twenty years would be the nadir of American Indian history, as the total Indian population between 1890 and 1910 fell to fewer than 250,000. (It was not until 1917 that Indian births exceeded deaths for the first time in fifty years.)”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned

“The notion of Spaniards fighting Frenchmen in Florida four decades before England established its first permanent settlement in America, and half a century before the Pilgrims sailed, is an unexpected notion to those accustomed to the familiar legends of Jamestown and Plymouth.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation

“Most of these displaced Acadians traveled south to the vicinity of New Orleans and would later be known as Cajuns.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation

“Puritanism—the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. —H. L. Mencken (1949)”
― Kenneth C. Davis, America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation

“By the time the war was over, Great Britain also had a new monarch in George III, who had taken the throne in 1760. And in Boston, a feisty American lawyer named James Otis would issue his first political tract and argue that American colonists possessed all the rights of an English citizen.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation

“The distinction between the Pilgrims, those who came to Plymouth between 1620 and 1630, and the Puritans, who came after 1629, initially settling Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut, eventually disappeared as the great wave of Puritan settlers transformed the colony.16”
― Kenneth C. Davis, America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation

“It might be useful to think about authoritarianism, totalitarianism, or any kind of dictatorship in the same way we think about dangerous, life-threatening, infectious diseases. The best prevention against such a disease is to build immunity. Education is like a vaccination. Understanding history is part of the process of making ourselves more immune to the dangers of dictatorship.”
― Kenneth C. Davis

“On April 30. 1789, George Washington stood on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York City, the temporary national capital. He took the oath of office on a Masonic Bible, ad-libbing the words “So help me God,” which the oath of office as specified in the Constitution does not require.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation

“how the innate and insatiable curiosity young children have about the world gets absolutely killed by the tedium of school.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About Mythology: Everything You Need to Know About the Greatest Stories in Human History but Never Learned

“Don’t Know Much About Mythology takes a slightly different tack. It sets out to examine all the fascinating myths created by these ancient cultures and relate them to their histories and achievements.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About Mythology: Everything You Need to Know About the Greatest Stories in Human History but Never Learned

“Of course, on a map oriented along the lines of this jingle: North to the ceiling, South to the floor, West to the window, East to the door it did appear that the Nile River flowed up. I can’t tell you much else about what happened in that classroom that year.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About Geography: Everything You Need to Know About the World but Never Learned

“Two boys wearing masks, the most visible symbol of the epidemic”
― Kenneth C. Davis, More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“throughout American history, and certainly under our existing corporate-sponsored democracy, a good case can be made that America is and has been a government of, for, and by the special interests.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned

“The word “planet” comes from the ancient Greek word for “wanderer,” because the planets seemed to move against the more fixed lights of the stars.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About the Universe: Everything You Need to Know About Outer Space but Never Learned

“what really led to the conquest of the Americas was not military might or a superior culture. The largest single factor in the destruction of the native populations in the Americas was the introduction of epidemic diseases to which the natives had no natural immunity.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About History

“Consistency of principles and message    •  Strength of character    •  Willingness to compromise—when necessary and consistent with principles    •  Recognizing talent and being surrounded by it without surrendering to it    •  Willingness to listen    •  Communication skills    •  Humor and a human touch”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About® the American Presidents (Don't Know Much About...

“The Purple Death was actually part of a great wave of influenza, a lethal virus that swept across America and around the world starting in the spring of 1918. A second, even deadlier wave of influenza appeared in late summer and autumn of 1918, and a third wave continued into 1919. This highly contagious disease, later widely known as Spanish flu, killed an estimated 675,000 Americans in one year, according to historian and professor Alfred Crosby. Consider this perspective: more Americans died from the flu in this short time than all the U.S. soldiers who died fighting in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. Indeed, the Spanish flu killed as many Americans in about a year as did HIV/AIDS, the most notorious epidemic of modern times, in more than thirty years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the estimated number of deaths from diagnosed HIV infection classified as AIDS in the United States since the first reported death in 1981 through 2014 was 678,509—about the same number that died of Spanish flu from 1918 to 1919.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“The past is prologue.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation

“For all too many Americans who dozed through American History 101, the Mayflower Compact might as well be a small car. Reconstruction has something to do with silicone implants. And the Louisiana Purchase means eating out at a Cajun restaurant. When the first edition of this book appeared more than twenty years ago, several writers had just enjoyed remarkable success by lambasting Americans’ failure to know our past.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned

“So I find myself in complete agreement with the American critic of businessmen who once attacked “men of wealth, who find the purchased politician the most efficient instrument of corruption”; men who were “the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminal of great wealth.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned

“The process of election affords a moral certainty that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About® the American Presidents (Don't Know Much About...

“Eve LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, pp. 238–39. Hutchinson’s many generations of descendants include Thomas Hutchinson, who later became governor of Massachusetts during the pre-Revolutionary days and whose policies incited the Boston Tea Party (see Chapter 4 ). In the twentieth century, her descendants included Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, making this rather extraordinary woman the ancestor of three American presidents.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation

“Joseph”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About Mythology: Everything You Need to Know About the Greatest Stories in Human History but Never Learned

“1539 First printing press in New World set up in Mexico City.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About History

“1525 French physician Jean Fernel is the first to calculate the length of a degree of latitude at very near its accepted length of 110.567 kilometers at the equator.”
― Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About Geography: Everything You Need to Know About the World but Never Learned