European Exploration Quotes

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.

I've lived in Paris. I've lived in the Slovak Republic. I've spent extensive time in England, and I've traveled all over Europe.

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.

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

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.

Why wasn't Christopher Columbus able to discover Spain?

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.

For me, to celebrate the twelfth of October is the absolute expression of triumphism, occupation and presumptuousness, and I think that history will remember those that celebrate it.

It's like, how did Columbus discover America when the Indians were already here? What kind of s-- is that, but white people's s--?

Well, I love Europe and I love Europeans; when I look at my own personal travel, for most of my life, 80 percent of it has been to European countries. And that was long before I ever considered becoming an ambassador or was offered the opportunity, because I love everything about Europe. I like the culture. I like the food. I like the charm.

Early on in life I knew that I was a writer, that I just wanted to write, I love books, I love literature and after graduating college, I kind of wandered around in Europe learning languages and writing novels and never led anywhere. And then I got into like journalism in New York as a way to kind of maybe find my way into the field and it wasn't a good fit. It just wasn't right for me.

Jan van Riebeeck's arrival in Cape Town was the beginning of all South Africa's problems.

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.

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.

Those new regions [America] which we found and explored with the fleet . . . we may rightly call a New World . . . a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa; and, in addition, a climate milder than in any other region known to us.

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

A water route to Chinese trade replacing the long, arduous Silk Road was a great dream of the Renaissance.

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.

Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no-one returned the same. Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney; momentous objects, beings and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books.

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.

Well, I first started going to Europe in the late '70s.

When I was 19 and at drama school, a couple of friends and I decided to drive from Guildford through France, down to the heel of Italy and then take a ferry to Greece - in an MG Midget. On our second day, in France, we were in a very bad accident and wrote off the car so we had to go home. But we then flew out instead and went island hopping.

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.

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