Pioneer Spirit Quotes

Achievement must be made against the possibility of failure, against the risk of defeat. It is no achievement to walk a tightrope laid flat on the floor. Where there is no risk, there can be no pride in achievement and, consequently, no happiness. The only way we can advance is by going forward, individually and collectively, in the spirit of the pioneer. We must take the risks involved in our free enterprise system. This is the only way in the world to economic freedom. There is no other way.

Generations hence, parents will take their children to these woods to show them how the land must have looked to the first Pilgrims and pioneers. And as Americans wander through these forests, climb these mountains, they will sense the love and majesty of the Creator of all of that.

I'm proud of my status as a pioneer in this business.

I respect anyone who could take a stagecoach ride from the East Coast to the West. You had to be a very special kind of person to survive that because it's the most uncomfortable ride in the world.

Stagecoach is really my first Western, actually.

The American Dream can no more remain static than can the American nation.... We cannot any longer take an old approach to world problems. They aren't the same problems. It isn't the same world. We must not adopt the methods of our ancestors; instead, we must emulate that pioneer quality in our ancestors that made them attempt new methods for a New World.

The pioneer spirit is still vigorous within this nation. Science offers a largely unexplored hinterland for the pioneer who has the tools for his task. The rewards of such exploration both for the Nation and the individual are great. Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.

The western will always be here. And it just depends on how good you make one. And one movie doesn't kill it. And one movie doesn't preserve it. It's storytelling. It's a very American thing. I'll continue to do it.

I was actually filming in Atlanta when I got a call from Walter Hill saying, "Well, it could be your turn to play Hickok." I said, "Oh, well, great!" He said, "What's your hair look like?" I said, "Well, it's short, Walter, but... I've still got that wig!" . He said, "Well, bring it!"

Commercialism is the blemish on the fair face of American life. Fighting against the terrible conditions of the explorer and pioneer, our forefathers had little time to think of beauty. Hearts and heads became as hardened to the more gracious things of life as did their bodies against physical hardship. Little by little, as nature yielded before the dynamite of their wills, life began to express itself in the same hard terms, and the great commerce of a New World bent everything to its indomitable will.

The early American arrived at a land of which he knew nothing.

When America's early pioneers first turned their eyes toward the West, they did not demand that somebody take care of them if they got ill or got old. They did not demand maximum pay for minimum work, and even pay for no work at all.

To many of us now, computers, silicon chips, data processing, cybernetics, and all the other innovations of the dawning high technology age are as mystifying as the workings of the combustion engine must have been when that first Model T rattled down Main Street, U.S.A. But as surely as America's pioneer spirit made us the industrial giant of the 20th century, the same pioneer spirit today is opening up on another vast front of opportunity, the frontier of high technology.

The West - the very words go straight to that place of the heart where Americans feel the spirit of pride in their western heritage - the triumph of personal courage over any obstacle, whether nature or man.

The history of my state of Oklahoma offers a great example of pursuing the American Dream. It was built and settled by pioneers moving West to seek better lives.

One thing I hate about the New Deal is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit. I simply do not know what to tell my own boys, leaving school and confronting this new world whose ideal is Security and whose practice is dependence upon government instead of upon one’s self.

I don't think we should have to do a Mars mission on the basis of hysteria. I think we should do a Mars mission on the basis of a deliberate judgment that what we want to do is open up a new planet for humanity... that we are continuing to be a nation of pioneers.

Just as the pioneer travelers of the Conestoga wagon days kept personal journals, I, as a pioneer space traveler, would do the same.

If a western is a good western, it gives you a sense of that world and some of the qualities those men had - their comradeship, loyalty, and physical courage.

I grew up in Alaska, okay? My dad graduated high school and went straight to the mountains. He had $300 and staked a claim. He didn't even have enough to put a title on the land: just had the records that he bought before he moved.

When people left on the Oregon Trail from St. Louis, they knew that only a fraction of them would make it to the West Coast. But they went anyway.

Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Women got the vote in Montana because the spirit of pioneer days is still alive.

I died in my boots like a pioneer With the whole wide sky above me.

Christ has meant everything to our marriage. It was my commitment to Christ and the words from my grandmother that made me stick with Phil [Robertson] when there wasn't much to hold on to. How has Phil changed? Do you have a year to hear about it? His love for the outdoors, his pioneer spirit, and his quest for adventure has not changed. But his heart has been turned inside out. He's a new man in every way that involves relationships.