Margot Asquith Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

Columbus saved the Indians from themselves.

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.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

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

It is a vulgar error to suppose that America was ever discovered. It was merely detected.

At a time when Europeans already had a long history of violent contact with Native people, Lewis and Clark made most of their journey in peace.

The Philippine races, like all the Malays, do not succumb before the foreigner, like the Australians, the Polynesians and the Indians of the New World.

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.

If America had been discovered as many times as I have, no one would remember Columbus.

We did not know there were other people besides the Indian until about one hundred winters ago, when some men with white faces came to our country.

In 1492, the natives discovered they were Indians; they discovered they lived in America.

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

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.

The humble American sweet potato helped China double its population to 300 million by 1800.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic don't just share an island, Hispaniola, but a history, one that includes all the signal events that went into creating the modern world: Columbus, conquest, genocide, slavery, imperial war, revolution, and U.S. counterinsurgencies and military occupations.

I was drinking tea the other day, and I thought: they used to fight wars over this.

This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth.

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.

It is but just and reasonable, that since you expose yourself to such danger to serve us, you should be rewarded for it. And we being willing to honor and favor you for the reasons aforesaid; Our will is, That you, Christopher Columbus, after discovering and conquering the said Islands and Continent in the said ocean, or any of them, shall be our Admiral of the said Islands and Continent you shall so discover and conquer; and that you be our Admiral, Vice-Roy, and Governor in them.

America, which up to the arrival of the Europeans had but one cereal, maize, and but one domestic animal for labor, the llama, and we can rejoice that the Europeans imported with themselves and their tools the ox, the ass and the horse, corn, cotton, sugarcane, coffee and finally the vine and the orange tree, creating there a new world of that glorious society which produces merchandise and which with an extraordinary swiftness of movement has already traversed the two phases of the blackest slavery and the most democratic wage system.

The land is very good, producing all the necessaries of life in abundance, but by reason of inactivity and idleness of the French inhabitants ... they themselves are living little better than the Indians