Oscar Wilde Quotes

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

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.

I am reminded by my journey how exceedingly new this country still is. You have only to travel for a few days into the interior and back parts even of many of the old States, to come to that very America which the Northmen, and Cabot, and Gosnold, and Smith, and Raleigh visited.

We are apt to think it the finest era of the world when America was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom.

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

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

And so by the fifteenth century, on October 8, the Europeans were looking for a new place to try to get to, and they came up with a new concept: the West.

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

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.

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

Many men of excellent wits and of divers singular gifts, overthrown by ... by some folly of youth, that are not able to live in England, may there be raised again, and do their country good service; and many needful uses there may (to great purpose) require the saving of great numbers, that for trifles may otherwise be devoured by the gallows. Many soldiers and servitors, in the end of the wars, that might be hurtful to this realm, may there be unladen, to the common profit and quiet of this realm, and to our foreign benefi there, as they may be employed. The frye [children] of the wandering beggars of England, that grow up idly, and hurteful and burdenous to this realm, may there be unladen, better bred up, and may people waste countries to the home and foreign benefit, and to their own more happy state.

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

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

When America was first made known to Europe, the part assumed by France on the borders of that new world was peculiar, and is little recognized. While the Spaniard roamed sea and land, burning for achievement, red-hot with bigotry and avarice, and while England, with soberer steps and a less dazzling result, followed in the path of discovery and gold-hunting, it was from France that those barbarous shores first learned to serve the ends of peaceful commercial industry.

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.

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.

So Columbus said, somebody show me the sunset and somebody did and he set sail for it, And he discovered America and they put him in jail for it, And the fetters gave him welts, And they named America after somebody else.

Columbus saved the Indians from themselves.

A land may be said to be discovered the first time a European, presumably an Englishman, sets foot on it.

And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?

The history of America is the history of families moving.

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

America is now a space-faring nation ... a frontier good for millions of years. The only time remotely comparable was when Columbus discovered the New World.

So many voyages and discoveries without result, and attended with so much hardship and expense, have caused us French in late years to attempt a permanent settlement in those lands which we call New France, in the hope of thus realizing more easily this object