Dave Barry Quotes

Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.

Since the discovery of Columbus, there has been no event of equal importance to the human race.

One might almost say that the history of geographical discovery, properly so called, begins with Captain Cook, the motive of whose voyages was purely scientific curiosity.

America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it.

I did projects on Champlain coming up the St. Lawrence River and on Henry Hudson cast adrift in the bay that now bears his name. And I read dozens of historical novels: Rosemary Sutcliff on Roman Britain and G. A. Henty on British heroes, though my all-time favourite was Ronald Welch's 'Knight Crusader.'

What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.

For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.

Hardly a name in profane history is more august than his. Hardly another character in the world's record has made so little of its opportunities. His discovery was a blunder; his blunder was a new world; the New World is his monument.

When that book came out, it was like Columbus telling about America at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella.

Some persons were to be sent in search of the river Missouri in order to discover whether it had any communication with the Pacific Ocean …

To bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathens. .... It was the Lord who put into my mind ... that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies

Columbus did not discover a new world; he established contact between two worlds, both already old.

Columbus was above all an explorer, and his historic achievements opened the Americas to trade and the eventual English settlements, settlements which grew into the most successful bastion of freedom and prosperity in human history, the United States of America.

As the grandson of Italian immigrants, maybe I am biased, but I think Christopher Columbus, the man who is rightfully credited with bringing European civilization to the Western Hemisphere, deserves the national holiday enacted by Congress in 1934.

A water route to Chinese trade replacing the long, arduous Silk Road was a great dream of the Renaissance.

This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth.

The spirit of Columbus hovers over us to-day.

It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.

The object of all the former voyages to the South Seas undertaken by the command of his present majesty, has been the advancement of science and the increase of knowledge.

In all parts of the Old World, as well as of the New, it was evident that Columbus had kindled a fire in every mariner's heart. That fire was the harbinger of a new era, for it was not to be extinguished.

Cod is more responsible for the discovery of the New World than almost anything else. Drove the Vikings across the North Atlantic, and John Cabot discovered America by looking for cod.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, 1793