How To Hide An Empire: A History Of The Greater United States Quotes
"So rich a soil we had never seen before; covered with clover in full bloom."
"Oases in the desert often vanish upon inspection."
"By blazing his trail through the wilderness, Boone had opened a channel through which hundreds of thousands of whites would soon pour."
"The disregard in which Daniel Boone was held may come as a surprise."
"The founders viewed frontiersmen like him with open suspicion."
"This was the raw nerve Daniel Boone had touched."
"The culture changed, too. Rather than being despised banditti or white savages on the fringes of civilization, settlers acquired a new identity: pioneers."
"The explosion of the white population was like a flash of dynamite."
"The United States of America was more than just a union of states. It was an amalgam of states and territory."
"We should have been better off if there had not been a single Cuban with the army. They accomplished literally nothing."
"I will never accept that our country be considered as conquered territory."
"The United States couldn’t annex Cuba. But it could occupy it, placing the country under military control until a suitable government could be installed—a government suitable to Washington, that is."
"Before the war with Spain, [McKinley] could not have told where those darned islands were within two thousand miles."
"I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight, and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night."
"The term ‘United States of America’ has ceased to be an accurate description of the countries over which the Stars and Stripes float."
"The real head-scratcher was the final essay question, worth most of the grade: Having seized Spain’s empire, what should the United States do with it? Explain your answer with reference to economics, geostrategy, and the prevailing racial ideologies of the late nineteenth century."
"The United States had no existing business in the Philippines—by one count, there were fewer than ten U.S. citizens there when the war broke out."
"Spain sold the Philippines to the United States for $20 million."
"Eighteen ninety-eight was a momentous break from the past, requiring new maps and names."
"It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them. They are even lower than Italians. What the island needs is not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population." - Cornelius P. Rhoads
"For the inhabitants of the world’s colonies, there were two Wilsons: Wilson the liberator, Wilson the racist."
"The year 1919 was, for the colonies, when the switch was thrown, when nationalist movements abandoned polite petitioning."
"The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by," he told Congress in a speech outlining his war aims.
"I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans." - Manuel Quezon
"The only solution is to use the methods which Hitler used effectively." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8 and transplanting cancer into several more." - Cornelius P. Rhoads
"There must be placed into the hand of each Puerto Rican a dagger, an arm in order that he may make valid the rights of his country." - Pedro Albizu Campos
"It is all very simple and painless," he continued. "You have people pass through a narrow passage and then there is a brrrrr of an electrical apparatus. They stay there for twenty seconds and from then on they are sterile." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"Where tyranny is law, revolution is order." - Pedro Albizu Campos
"I cannot stand this constant reference to England, to Europe. I am here and my people are here under the heels of a conqueror."
"We’re the battling bastards of Bataan: No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam, No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces, No rifles, no guns or artillery pieces, And nobody gives a damn."
"To me, the loss of a single American life to save a building was unthinkable."
"We slammed the back door shut before we began to fight."
"The applause was deafening... As [the flag] climbed the pole, he wept."
"The Japanese swarmed all over the Philippines like clouds of termites."
"If you escaped the shells of the Americans, you could not escape the machine guns or bayonets of the Japanese."
"It was as if the Philippines had become one vast military prison."
"In our mind's eyes we saw the vast fleet of steel gray ships steaming toward us, their bows cutting the waves sending up a multi-colored spray."
"How I wished he had been with us on Bataan! I should have liked showing him miles of fox holes piled with American and Filipino bodies and asked him to repeat over that mingled flesh ‘never the twain shall meet.’"
"War is entropy. Atoms split, buildings tumble, people die, and things fall apart."
"The largest buildings had been transformed into mere piles of rubble and debris."
"We are now concerned with the peace of the entire world, and the peace can only be maintained by the strong."
"The novelist Neal Stephenson got it right when he described the U.S. military in World War II as 'first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization.'"
"Never before in the history of the United States had such enormous and absolute power been placed in the hands of a single individual."
"For every 'American life' lost, 100 Manilans died."
"If the United States were as crowded as Puerto Rico, it would contain almost all the people of the world."
"In a way, Butler’s prediction turned out to be right. Alaska sent to the Senate Ernest Gruening, who had made a decades-long career of opposing racism and imperialism."
"Watching from afar, the Harlem poet Langston Hughes offered a prediction. Europe and the United States would take their former possessions back, he wrote. 'But when they do, those great cities of the East will never be the same again.'"
"By the time he died, Inouye was president pro tempore of the Senate, which put him third in the line of succession to the presidency."
"As Puerto Ricans poured in from the island, the tabloid press trumpeted sensational tales of their malfeasance."
"Before West Side Story premiered, the editors of La Prensa, a Puerto Rican paper in New York, called the show’s producers to object to the portrayal of Puerto Rico as disease-ridden."
"Nobody knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America."
"The calculus was the same as for rubber. The Axis powers, Japan in particular, had cut the United States off from vital supplies. So the military sought to use plastic, made mostly from oil, as a substitute for any 'strategic' material that could no longer be easily got."
"Between 1930 and 1950, the volume of plastics produced annually in the world grew fortyfold."
"The United States could have tried to handle this verbal barrage by building its own all-red network, but a truly secure planetary cable system required, as the British had shown, a globe-spanning colonial empire."
"The United States neither claimed new colonies nor organized the joint colonization of the tropics. Instead, synthetics dulled its hunger pangs."
"The screw thread is a simple device, but it ties together the whole mechanical skeleton of our civilization."
"The half-inch nuts screw onto all the half-inch bolts."
"The war against Hitler may have been a European fight, but it was very much made in the U.S.A."
"The integration of the entire process into a smooth flow like a great river system."
"Anyone suggesting such precision would have been deemed 'absolutely insane.'"
"It was the same ballet between governmental officials and industrial leaders that Herbert Hoover had choreographed, danced at twice the tempo."
"The entire Australian shoe industry was similarly overturned as shoemakers retooled to make shoes in U.S. sizes rather than British ones."
"Almost every phase of Australia’s food industry has been profoundly affected by the activities of the remarkable team of specialists brought out here for the US to guide and advise us."
"One thread to rule them all: The 1945 standard."
"Quite a lot of things, in fact, would have to be remade to a metaphorical 60-degree angle."
"The ongoing U.S. rejection of metric measures leads to frequent annoyance and occasional catastrophe."
"The United States stands with Myanmar, Liberia, the Independent State of Samoa, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands as the sole holdouts against the metric system."
"The limits of English became painfully clear during the Second World War."
"The product comes from America so we must either adapt to English or stop using it."
"The military doesn’t have bases on Okinawa; the island itself is the base."
"The world could wake up and live again."
"The United States could force other countries to adopt its screw thread angle in the name of international cooperation. But it was never bound by those imperatives itself."
"You pick precisely which target you want. You can want the men’s room or you can want the ladies’ room."
"If we were a true empire, we would currently preside over a much greater piece of the earth’s surface."
"We’re not a colonial power. We’re a liberating power."
"It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal."
"The presence and activities of our forces grate on local populations."
"You belong to me and I can do with you as best I please."
"This is old-school colonialism all over again."
"The myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims."
"It is unconscionable to let the country become an American colony with American soldiers—their filthy feet roaming everywhere."
"Your forces occupy our countries. You spread your military bases throughout them."