Mario Testino Quotes

When Harvard University opened its doors in 1636, there were already well-established Universities in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru.

Peru was the Incas; it has 3,000 to 4,000 years of history.

That was when the Spanish came in and conquered the Aztecs. I thought that was a clever thing.

In high school, I loved history. I also loved cosmography, algebra. Mexico is so rich in culture and history, and I have always enjoyed that.

The tyrant Bolivar and his indecent supporters ought to annex Peru, and place this rich country under the control of Columbia, but he has made a mistake. The Spaniards are the only alternative who can avert our ruin.

The hatred that the Peninsula has inspired in us is greater than the ocean between us. It would be easier to have the two continents meet than to reconcile the spirits of the two countries. The habit of obedience; a community of interest, of understanding, of religion; mutual goodwill; a tender regard for the birthplace and good name of our forefathers; in short, all that gave rise to our hopes, came to us from Spain

It is the object of this Government to be on terms of peace with you, and with all of our red brethren. We make treaties with you and we try to observe them; and if our children should sometimes behave badly, and violate these treaties, it is against our wish.

Latin America was born with a birth defect: a highly unequal initial distribution of resources that dates back to the colonial era.

[W]e can be certain that, though preached to more than fifty years, if they [the Aztecs] were now left alone, if the Spanish nation were not to intercede, I am certain that in less than fifty years there would be no trace of the preaching which has been done for them.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic don't just share an island, Hispaniola, but a history, one that includes all the signal events that went into creating the modern world: Columbus, conquest, genocide, slavery, imperial war, revolution, and U.S. counterinsurgencies and military occupations.

'Hispanic' is a reference to Hispania, the name by which Spain was known in the Roman period, and there has always been strong ambivalence toward Spain in its former colonies.

It would be a very strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages [the Iroquois] could be capable or forming a scheme for such a union ... and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary.

I will see that the sons and daughters of the European colonists…have at least such an education…as will fit them to maintain their unquestioned superiority in this land.

We conceive the recovery of her colonies by Spain to be hopeless,,, We aim not at the possession of any portion of them ourselves. We could not see any portion of them transferred to any other power with indifference.

The deed is done, the nail is driven, Spanish America is free; and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English

The conservation of monarchy in any portion of South America will tend to break the shock of that inevitable divorce by which the New World is about to be divided by the Old... But as to putting it forward, as a project or proposition of ours, that is out of the question. Monarchy in Mexico, and monarchy in Brazil, would cure the evils of universal democracy, and prevent the drawing of the line which I almost dread – America versus Europe. The United States, naturally enough, aim at this division and cherish the democracy which leads to it.

General San Martin will never shed the blood of his compatriots, and he will unsheath his sword only against the enemies of the independence of South America.

16,000,000 Americans either defend their rights or suffer repression at the hands of Spain, which, although once the world's greatest empire, is now too weak, with what little is left her, to rule the new hemisphere or even to maintain herself in the old. And shall Europe, the civilized, the merchant, the lover of liberty allow an aged serpent, bent only on satisfying its venomous rage, devour the fairest part of our globe? What! Is Europe deaf to the clamor of her own interests? Has she no eyes to see justice?

Success will crown our efforts, because the destiny of America has been irrevocably decided; the tie that bound her to Spain has been severed.

We have no concern with South America. We can have no well-founded political sympathy with them. We are sprung from different stock.

Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North or South, is to be peopled … speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws.

I have some fears for our South American brethren; the qualifications for self-government are not innate. They are the result of habit and long training, and for these they will require time and probably much suffering.

The American land was more like a widow than a virgin. Europeans did not find a wilderness here; rather, however involuntarily, they made one.

Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish, the famine; and Jews, the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared of the Americans on one side and of the bush on the other

God forbid that these beautiful countries become, as did St. Domingue, a theatre of blood and of crime under the pretext of establishing liberty, let them rather remain if necessary one century more under the barbarous and imbecile oppression of Spain.