William F. Giles Quotes

Destiny beckons us to hold and civilize Mexico.

Sir, our natural boundary is the Pacific Ocean. The swelling tide of our population must and will roll on until that mighty ocean interposes its waters, and limits our territorial empire.

Their determination to project power was the same impulse that pushed settlers across prairies and over mountains, wrested rich territories from Mexico, crushed Native American resistance, and drew the United States into wars from Central America to Siberia. It remains potent.

It is, beyond question, the destiny of our race to spread themselves over the continent of North America, and this at no distant day.

We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is Manifest Destiny.

It is our glory that whilst other nations have extended their dominions by the sword we have never acquired any territory except by fair purchase or, as in the case of Texas, by the voluntary determination of a brave, kindred, and independent people to blend their destinies with our own.

We are destined to own and control the whole western continent from Baffin's bay to the Caribbean sea ... we need not be in a hurry. When the fruit is ripe, it will fall into our hands.

The waves of population and civilization are rolling to the westward, and we now propose to acquire the countries occupied by the red men of the South and West by a fair exchange.

The President [Thomas Jefferson] has been all his life a man of letters, very speculative and a lover of glory, and it would be possible he might attempt to perpetuate the fame of his administration … by discovering … the way by which Americans may some day extend their population and their influence up to the Pacific Ocean

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.

Manifest Destiny on the hoof

I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race... If there be a God, I think that what he would like me to do is paint as much of the map of Africa British Red as possible...

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.

Mr. Tyler acquired Texas by voluntary compact, and Mr. Polk California and New Mexico by successful war.

[America should be a] nation, coextensive with the North American continent, destined by God and nature to be the most populous and powerful people ever combined under one social compact.

We maintain that it is a right of humanity … that this vast territory be inhabited by an industrious people.

Since the dispersion of man upon earth, I know of no human event, past or present, which promises a greater, a more beneficent change upon earth than the arrival of the van of the Caucasian race (the Celtic-Anglo-Saxon division) upon the border of the sea which washes the shore of eastern Asia …. It would seem that the White race alone received the divine command, to subdue and replenish the earth! for it is the only race that has obeyed it--the only one that hunts out new and distant lands, and even a New World, to subdue and replenish....

It being perhaps the only large tract of country and certainly the first which lying out of the boundaries of the Union will be settled by the people of the United States.

It is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand … and cover the whole northern if not the southern continent.

We have quietly and almost without observation, annexed all the country between here [Ottawa] and the Rocky Mountains.

Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way ;, The four first Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day; Time's noblest Offspring is the last

The pioneer army perpetually... strikes to the front. Empire plants itself upon the trails.

The whites didn’t really steal the land, because the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves

Annexation of new land for America is injudicious in policy and wicked in fact.

Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.