Herbert Croly Quotes

Part of the western movement is this desire that we, Americans, have to keep pressing on.

Young man, there is America -- which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men, and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.

The idea of the frontier is a stand-in for the idea of liberty.

America has been the New World in all tongues, to all peoples, not because this continent was a new-found land, but because all those who came here believed they could create upon this continent a new life -- a life that should be new in freedom.

The early American arrived at a land of which he knew nothing.

I wanted to think about our creation myth; you know, what is the fundamental story that defines America. And it certainly is the West.

There is in every American, I think, something of the old Daniel Boone - who, when he could see the smoke from another chimney, felt himself too crowded and moved further out into the wilderness.

We of America are especially fitted to visualize and to understand the marvellous transformation of a wilderness into a land of splendid cities.

Westward, ever westward.

Soon you’ll be whirled along by steam in a country now only inhabited by wild beasts and Indians

Since (by the good providence of God) a country in America is fallen to my lot, I thought it not less my duty than my honest interest to give some public notice of it to the world, that those of our own, or other nations, that are inclined to transport themselves or families beyond the seas, may find another country added to their choice

The destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent -- to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean... to change darkness into light and confirm the destiny of the human race.

I've always believed that this blessed land was set apart in a special way, that some divine plan placed this great continent here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the Earth who had a special love for freedom and the courage to uproot themselves, leave homeland and friends, to come to a strange land. And coming here they created something new in all the history of mankind-a land where man is not beholden to government, government is beholden to man.

America was still a land of wonder. The ancient spell still hung unbroken over the wild, vast world of mystery beyond the sea,-a land of romance, adventure, and gold.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

In a continent but recently settled, many parts of which have as yet little historical or cultural background, the material for this volume has been gathered from a section that was one of the first to be colonized.

The white men in the East are like birds. They are hatching out their eggs every year, and there is not room enough in the East, and they must go elsewhere; and they come out West, as you have seen them coming for the last few years.

It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.

I think America is a new country. It is a young culture. The spirit of the opening of the West is still with the Americans. It's a very practical and individual-based kind of philosophy that had worked in America for a long time, had been very successful. And the spirit is very much there.

America, when it became known to Europeans, was, as it had long been, a scene of wide-spread revolution.

Frontiersmen good and bad, gunmen as well as inspired prophets of the future, have been my camp companions. Thus, I know the country of which I am about to write as few men now living have known it.

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.