Elias Cornelius Boudinot Quotes

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.

Free Englishmen had independently settled North America in precisely the same their Saxon ancestors … had possessed themselves of the island of Britain.

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

Once, America's size in the imagination was limitless. After Europeans settled and changed it, working from the coasts inland, its size in the imagination shrank.

For a time during the early settlement of this country peace and goodwill prevailed, only to be followed later by violent and relentless warfare.

Our relations with the Indians have been governed chiefly by treaties and trade, or war and subjugation.

Here, we tell the story: why the people came here, what they did when they got here, going back to the Native Americans and coming all the way forward.

But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.

No acid ever worked more mechanically on a vegetable fiber than the white man acted on the Indian. As the line of American settlements approached, the nearest Indian tribes withered away.

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

The emancipation of Texas will extend the principles of self-government, over a rich and neighbouring country, and open a vast field there for enterprise, wealth, and happiness, and for those who wish to escape from the frozen blasts of a northern climate, by removing to a more congenial one. It will promote and accelerate the march of the present age, for it will open a door through which a bright and constant stream of light and intelligence will flow from this great northern fountain over the benighted regions of Mexico

The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers.

The tribes which occupied the countries now constituting the Eastern States were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites.

White men come in like a river. They told us that they only wanted a little land. But we knew better.

A new bubble will replace the old one. A new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one. In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped.

Who came to this country first—the white man, didn’t he? That’s who made this country great.

The pious ones of Plymouth, who, reaching the Rock, first fell upon their knees and then upon the aborigines.

People tend to migrate from the third world to the metropolises of the very countries that once dominated them. Algerians to Paris; Puerto Ricans to New York; Pakistanis to London.

England was made by adventurers, not by its government.

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.

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

… these bold and indigent strangers, saying as their excuse when challenged for titles, that we had solicited for colonists and they had come accordingly … [that it] was against the laws of God and nature that so much land should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to work on and to raise their bread..

It was thought good policy to settle those lands as fast as possible, and that the granting them to men of the first consequence who were likeliest and best able to procure large bodies of people to settle on them was the most probable means of effecting the end proposed.

Colonies, then, are the seeds of nations begun and nourished by the care of wise and populous Countries, as conceiving them best for the increase of human stock, and beneficial for commerce. Some of the wisest men in history have justly taken their fame from this design and service