Frontier Expansion Quotes

A few years back Texas was a wilderness, the home of the uncivilized and wandering Comanche and other tribes of Indians, who waged a constant warfare against the Spanish settlements…. In order to restrain these savages and bring them into subjection, the government opened Texas for settlement. Foreign emigrants were invited and called to that country. American enterprise accepted the invitation and promptly responded to the call

To leave Indian tribes in possession of their country is to leave the country a wilderness.

Europeans have learned of the immense extent of our country and its limitless resources … They have also begun, or soon will begin, to learn of the Homestead law and provisions for securing to every man not only life, liberty and the freedom to pursue happiness but also the means of gaining an independent livelihood.

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.

Why are we now going into space? Well, why did we trouble to look past the next mountain? Our prime obligation to ourselves is to make the unknown known. We are on a journey to keep an appointment with whatever we are.

The testimony of every scientist is that the frontiers that are opening out ahead of us now are far wider and more spectacular than any frontier of America in the past. Our horizons are not closed. We are going to write a greater development in America than has ever been conceived.

Westward the star of empire takes its way.

History shows that when a state is intent upon making war against another state, even though not adjacent, it begins to seek frontiers across which it could reach the frontiers of the state which it desires to attack. Usually, the aggressive state finds that frontier.

Science is a field which grows continuously with ever expanding frontiers.

The frontier of America is on the Rhine.

The enactment of the Homestead Act would create the strongest tie between the citizen and the Government-he would with cheerfulness contribute his proportionable part of the taxes to defray the expenses of the political system under which he lived.

I don't know what specific frontiers Germany could adopt for her purposes, but I think that those willing "to lend" a frontier to her can be found.

In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, 'cause it was lawless. A man's word had to mean something.

The lands granted were in the occupancy of savages and situated in a wilderness, of which the government had never taken possession, and of which it could not with its own citizens ever have taken possession.

I've grown up watching a lot of Western genre films on TV, and America is not just a country, but it's one of the most important countries in the world, and examining the process of how this nation came to be, it's an important thing, even for outsiders.

Thus we behold Kentucky, lately an howling wilderness, the habitation of savages and wild beasts, become a fruitful field; this region, so favourably distinguished by nature, now become the habitation of civilization, at a period unparalleled in history, in the midst of a raging war, and under all the disadvantages of emigration to a country so remote from the inhabited parts of the continent.

What opened up the American West was the fact that you owned the real estate. You owned the gold mines, the oil wells. The creation of these, back then, million dollar industries drove the railroads and eventually the airlines to provide this kind of transportation.

There are three reasons, . . . apart from scientific considerations, mankind needs to travel in space. The first . . . is garbage disposal; we need to transfer industrial processes into space so that the earth may remain a green and pleasant place for our grandchildren to live in. The second . . . to escape material impoverishment: the resources of this planet are finite, and we shall not forego forever the abundance of solar energy and minerals and living space that are spread out all around us. The third . . . our spiritual need for an open frontier.

Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.

It's time to open the space frontier to citizen explorers.

In fiction, too, after the death of Cooper the main tendency for nearly a generation was away from the conquest of new borders to the closer cultivation, east of the Mississippi, of ground already marked.

The Indians began to be troublesome all around me, killing and wounding cattle, stealing horses, and threatening to attack us. I was obliged to make campaigns against them and punish them.

It may be proper to observe, that I had now passed the utmost frontier of the white settlements on that border.

Above all things expand the frontiers of science: without this the rest counts for nothing.

The American West is just arriving at the threshold of its greatness and growth. Where the West of yesterday is glamorized in our fiction, the future of the American West now is both fabulous and factual.