James L. Haley > Quotes

“Both in concept and infrastructure American democracy was majestic, but when one came down to the actual, individual men who worked behind those imposing marble facades, the people were as likely as not to elect seedy, shortsighted, self-serving jingoes who embarrassed their offices.”
― James L. Haley, Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

“And then the struggle was on for the next seven monarchs: to balance bringing their people into the Industrial Age while preserving for them some sense of cultural identity; to maintain the sovereignty of their country while dealing with the greediest and most powerful empires in the world; to provide a modern economy and wealth for their people while becoming snared ever tighter in the grip of the American economic colossus. For all this to have taken place in the span of one human lifetime is a pageant of imperial triumph and human tragedy rare, if not unknown, elsewhere in history.”
― James L. Haley, Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

“The Virginians of the mountains, and of the broad valley of the Shenandoah River just beyond, were a different breed.”
― James L. Haley, Sam Houston

“Bear in mind,” he once wrote a correspondent, “that all Histories from the Rock of Plymouth, and Jamestown to the present time, have been made by white men, and a man who tells his own story, is always right until the adversary’s tale is told”
― James L. Haley, Sam Houston

“It was his fifth son and namesake, Sam, thirteen at the time of his father’s death, who could lose himself in the shelves of books even to the detriment of his formal education.”
― James L. Haley, Sam Houston

“may have conquered Santa Anna,” Nancy Lea was fond of telling him, “but you will never conquer me.”
― James L. Haley, Sam Houston

“President Jefferson and the members of the current Congress. Whenever the man commits some new act meriting opprobrium, even outrage, his henchmen in the Congress scurry about like mad to search out arguments to make it sound as though what he has done is not just legal, but is somehow congruent with his political philosophy.”
― James L. Haley, The Shores of Tripoli

“cook and sleep. Until”
― James L. Haley, Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii

“But although the young Houston could secret himself away for hours enraptured by the classics, in a classroom he remained, from all indications, terrible.”
― James L. Haley, Sam Houston

“in sum, he had been satisfied reading Homer’s Odyssey instead of setting off to create his own?”
― James L. Haley, Sam Houston

“The same station in life, one should note, in which the youthful Houston had stood in relation to Andrew Jackson. One of the most remarkable but least remarked on facts of Sam Houston’s life is that he habitually collected about him young protégés and informal wards, even as Jackson had done.”
― James L. Haley, Sam Houston

“I have no hope for Sam,” he sighed. “He is so wild.”5”
― James L. Haley, Sam Houston