Kris Kristofferson Quotes

The West is now closed.

I've always been a fan of Westerns, but my favorite kind of Westerns mostly were Sam Peckinpah's Westerns, and they mainly took place in the West that was changing.

It was my effort, in depicting the West, to depict it as it was.

When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.

I was persuaded now that I was destined to lead a life on the Plains.

I come from pioneer stock, developers of the West, people who went out into the wilderness and set up home with nothing but a pair of oxen.

The red man must leave the land of his youth and find a new home in the west. The armies of the white are without number, like the sand of the sea, and ruin will follow all tribes that go to war with them.

While the government underwrote the West more than any other region, the myth claimed that hardworking Western cowboys and settlers wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to work out their own destiny.

I came west for opportunity. I made Lincoln my home.

A good folk song tells you something you already know, in a form you're already familiar with, on terms that were set down long before you were born - when the country was primarily windblown dust, open wagon trains, and dysfunctional towns like Deadwood.

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, a bill opening one half million square miles of territory in the western United States for settlement.

I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.

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.

Those who want to divide the workers have resorted to the foulest methods.

I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.

It may be proper to observe, that I had now passed the utmost frontier of the white settlements on that border.

America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.

The core issue here is that the Israeli government refuses to commit to terms of reference for the negotiations that are based on international law and United Nations resolutions, and that it frantically continues to intensify building of settlements on the territory of the State of Palestine.

But the West of the old times, with its strong characters, its stern battles and its tremendous stretches of loneliness, can never be blotted from my mind.

When my parents first arrived there, North Dakota had just been admitted to the Union, and the country was still wild and harsh.

Flagrant injustice, cruelty and oppression…if left unchecked will so multiply that the whole of the native border tribes will be provoked into a battle of dangerous exasperation.

The Jew seeks space to continue living, while the Arab defends his space to the death.

Let the emigrants go on; and carry their rifles. We want 30 thousand rifles in the valley of the Oregon; they will make all quiet there ... will annihilate the Hudson's Bay Company, drive them off our continent, quiet their Indians, and protect the American interests.

Here was all these cheap long-horned steers over-running Texas; here was the rest of the country crying out for beef -- and no railroads in Texas to get them out. So they trailed them out, across hundreds of miles of wild country

The West is the most powerful reality in the history of this country. It's always had a power, a presence, an attraction that differentiated it from the rest of the United States.