Colonial United States Quotes & Sayings

All the sparrows on the rooftops are crying about the fact that the most imperialist nation that is supporting the colonial regime in the colonies is the United States of America. — Nikita Khrushchev

For similar folly, our own country, in the transition from the colonial period, also paid a fearful price; and from a like catastrophe the United States has been twice saved in our time by the arguments formulated by Turgot. — Andrew Dickson White

[Bill] Clinton was a pretty good president for a Republican. — Michael Moore

Children only come through you, you don't create them. It is a privilege that they have happened through you. Enjoy the privilege; don't think of it as an authority. Just enjoy the privilege that another life chose to come through you into this world. — Jaggi Vasudev

What is your vision of ideal world? — Lailah Gifty Akita

Fantasy is the tendency of Americans, going back to colonial times, to look at the Middle East as a type of fractured mirror of the United States - a type of mirror that could look a lot more like the United States, if, say, a Middle Eastern George Washington would emerge. — Michael Oren

I figured if I hoped hard enough, you wouldn't stand a chance, that even if you were straight, you'd succumb to my sparkling charm and wit and you'd convert just for me."

I almost choked on the last sip of my wine. "And you'd win the toaster oven," I teased.

"Yes, — Eva Indigo

(Bonus points if the presentation is already available via a TED Talk, and they still asked you to perform in person.) — Anonymous

Some people say there's nothing new under the sun. I still think that there's room to create, you know. And intuition doesn't necessarily come from under this sun. It comes from within. — Pharrell Williams

Expansion presented the United States with a dilemma that has confronted many colonial powers. If it allowed democracy to flower in the countries it controlled, those nations would begin acting in accordance with their own interests rather than the interests of the United States, and American influence over them would diminish. — Stephen Kinzer

Having therefore no foreign establishments, either colonial or military, the ships of war of the United States, in war, will be like land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores. To provide resting places for them, where they can coal and repair, would be one of the first duties of a government proposing to itself the development of the power of the nation at sea. — Alfred Thayer Mahan

Life seems far away from the balcony of your house; come down, come nearer to the life! Never let the life to be far away from you! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

He walked around all the useless things in the courtyard and touched them with his hands; for some reason, he wished that these would remember him, and love him. But he didn't believe they would. From childhood memories he knew how strange and sad it is after a long absence to see a familiar place again, for these unmoving objects have no memory and do not recognize the stirrings of a stranger's heart. — Andrei Platonov

The Network of Enlightenment watches over a world and guides it, tenderly. Not interfering in its natural course of evolution is our way. — Frederick Lenz

We have been gradually finding out that there is more democracy in letting a committee or representative ten to details than in making everybody's business nobody's business. — Edward Pearson Pressey

If written in the three-letter words of the four-letter alphabet,a human being is determined by a genetic narrative long enough to fill the equivalent of 500 Bibles.In the meantime human beings have discovered this for themselves. That's right. They have uncovered our profoundest concept
namely, that life is ultimately reading. They themselves are the Book of Books. — Harry Mulisch

You always question people's intentions. That may be a combination of having money, having fame, and being a little older. — Matt LeBlanc

It was an early saying here [Massachusetts] that there were 'Roots enough to plant Hampshire County and Gunns enough to defend them. — Edward Pearson Pressey

the tall white windmills that came to her mind. How their skinny long arms all turned, but never together, except for just once in a while two of them would be turning the same way, their arms poised at the same place in the sky. — Elizabeth Strout

It's hard knowing who to trust with your personal life. When you cry in your room at night, you don't always know who to call. — Lady Gaga

Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Britain, the latter the colonial administrator, forcibly removed the indigenous inhabitants of the islands, the Chagossians. Most of the two thousand deportees ended up more than a thousand miles away in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they were thrown into lives of poverty and forgotten. The purpose of this expulsion was to create a major US military base on one of the Chagossian islands, Diego Garcia. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

New Englanders began the Revolution not to institute reforms and changes in the order of things, but to save the institutions and customs that already had become old and venerable with them; and were new only to a few stupid Englishmen a hundred and fifty years behind the times. — Edward Pearson Pressey

Why do so many young people literally die to belong to fraternities, sororities, and other college social organizations? The answer is complicated, but here is a starting point:
Ever since the medieval universities were founded, young people have done whatever it takes to gain acceptance, to break with their past lives, to achieve a sense of power, to carve out a society of their own that isn't quite what their tutors and teachers had in mind. In the United States, hazing and drinking have been endemic since colonial days. — Hank Nuwer

Second, there is something insidiously pathological about the melting pot concept in its assumption that groups should assimilate. Wehrly states, "Cultural assimilation, as practiced in the United States, is the expectation by the people in power that all immigrants and people outside the dominant group will give up their ethnic and cultural values and will adopt the values and norms of the dominant society - the White, male Euro-Americans" (1995, p. 5). Many psychologists of color, however, have referred to this process as cultural genocide, an outcome of colonial thought (Guthrie, 1997; Thomas & Sillen, 1972). — Derald Wing Sue

For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is as bitter as wormword, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell — Justin Cronin

For all its celebration of markets and individual initiative, this alliance of government and finance often produces results that bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of bureaucratization in the former Soviet Union or former colonial backwaters of the Global South. There is a rich anthropological literature, for instance, on the cult of certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the former colonial world. Often the argument is that in countries like Bangladesh, Trinidad, or Cameroon, which hover between the stifling legacy of colonial domination and their own magical traditions, official credentials are seen as a kind of material fetish - magical objects conveying power in their own right, entirely apart from the real knowledge, experience, or training they're supposed to represent. But since the eighties, the real explosion of credentialism has been in what are supposedly the most "advanced" economies, like the United States, Great Britain, or Canada. — David Graeber

US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twenty-first century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, and removals of Indigenous children to military-like boarding schools. The absence of even the slightest note of regret or tragedy in the annual celebration of the US independence betrays a deep disconnect in the consciousness of US Americans. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

I have long argued that, if China and the United States were interested in pursuing a strategic partnership, Africa is the best place to start, as neither enters the situation with past colonial baggage, and both possess interests that are quite complementary. — Thomas P.M. Barnett

If given a chance, I would really want to explore the monuments in Delhi, like Qutub Minar and the forts. I have been there as a child, but now I want to go back and understand the history and significance behind them. We take all of these things for granted in life. — Shreya Ghoshal

The important point of this report [Montague, Massachusetts; July 7, 1774] may be summed up in six resolutions: 1. We approve of the plan for a Continental Congress September 1, at Philadelphia. 2. We urge the disuse of India teas and British goods. 3. We will act for the suppression of pedlers and petty chapmen (supposably vendors of dutiable wares). 4. And work to promote American manufacturing. 5. We ought to relieve Boston. 6. We appoint the 14th day of July, a day of humiliation and prayer. — Edward Pearson Pressey

One of the great disappointments of our time has been that the United States, a beacon of hope during the freedom struggles of the Asian peoples, succumbed to the views and greater colonial experience of nations grown to power in an earlier period. — Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit