Candice Millard Quotes

In the 1920's U. S. Marines were periodically sent to Nicaragua to prevent the fiscal protectorate from revolution. The administration was accused of making war on Nicaragua:] We are not making war on Nicaragua any more than a policeman on the street is making war on passers-by.

That's exactly what made America so different, we don't have that colonial aspect of let's go conquer somebody else and make our nation bigger and that's because of the faith element.

People in Latin America... love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.

The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.

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

I'm not saying this in a condescending kind of way, but it's quite simple: The making of America was a heroic thing. Australia has a much murkier, much more complex view of its history. It's just full of all these open wounds we don't really know what to do with.

And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.

Philippine history has been far too long defined by the countries that controlled the country.

The United States is trying to hide its defeats and failures. And that’s why it is pointing its finger at us.

It is a myth that most people throughout the world hate America. They hate the American government and the American military …. They love American culture—they have made it the world’s culture.

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.

The mission of the United States [to the Philippine Islands] is one of benevolent assimilation, submitting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.

These natives prefer the name of Americans to that of Creoles, since the peace of Versailles, and particularly since 1789, one often hears them say with pride: “I am not a Spaniard, I am an American.”

Americans do not recognize the effect of American power in the world. … People all over the world ask, “Why can’t Americans see how American power affects us?”

Much of how Americans have always understood their history, culture, and identity depends on positioning Europe as the 'other,' as that 'old world' against which they define themselves.

If you want to look at the Monroe Doctrine and what happened when we wrote that, we stated what the business would be for America's power, especially in this hemisphere. We have always been the colonizer of this hemisphere, wherever we've been.

Before they became Americans, most white inhabitants of the 13 colonies considered themselves British. It was predictable, therefore, that they would lust after empire, because this was exactly what their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic also did.

Yemen is a symbol of our continued military hubris in the Middle East - an addiction Obama was supposed to cure but didn't.

In the course of history, all empires have been created with premeditation, by an effort often sustained over several generations. Every power has been Roman to a degree. The United States is the first nation to become the most powerful in the world without having sought to be so. Its exceptional energy and organization have never been oriented toward conquest.

Because of my politics, people think I'm anti-American. But I was quite the reverse. What I don't like about the United States is when the government acts like an old, imperial 18th- or 19th-century European power.

The American way of life is not negotiable.

Interventionism is inextricable from the American idea. If the United States retreats into isolationism, it ceases to be itself ? a nation dedicated, however much it falls short, to a universalist ideal of freedom.

We do not need to import any foreign economic ideas or any foreign government. We had better stick to the American brand of government, the American brand of equality, and the American brand of wages. America had better stay American