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Colonial history of the United States

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  •    Behold! they come—those sainted forms,
       Unshaken through the strife of storms;
       Heaven's winter cloud hangs coldly down,
       And earth puts on its rudest frown;
       But colder, ruder was the hand,
       That drove them from their own fair land,
    Their own fair land—refinement's chosen seat,
    Art's trophied dwelling, learning's green retreat;
    By valour guarded, and by victory crowned,
    For all, but gentle charity, renowned.
       With streaming eye, yet steadfast heart,
       Even from that land they dared to part,
          And burst each tender tie;
       Haunts, where their sunny youth was passed,
       Homes, where they fondly hoped at last
          In peaceful age to die;
       Friends, kindred, comfort, all they spurned—
          Their fathers' hallowed graves;
       And to a world of darkness turned,
          Beyond a world of waves.
  • Our fathers have been ridiculed as an uncouth and uncourtly generation. And truly, it must be admitted that they were not as expert in the graces of dress, and the etiquette of the drawing-room, as some of their descendants. But neither could these have felled the trees, nor guided the plough, nor spread the sail which they did; nor braved the dangers of Indian warfare, nor displayed the wisdom in counsel which our fathers displayed. And had none stepped upon the Plymouth rock but such effeminate critics as these, the poor natives never would have mourned the wilderness lost, but would have brushed them from the land as they would brush the puny insect from their face; the Pequods would have slept in safety that night which was their last, and no intrepid Mason had hung upon their rear, and driven into exile the panic-struck fugitives.

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  • We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly to revere God and be God. ~ Daniel Boorstin
  • The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide open spaces surrounded by teeth. ~ Charles Luckman
  • America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar, and use it up in two weeks. ~ John Barrymore
  • America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time It wags its tail, it knocks over a chair. ~ Arnold Toynbee
  • A good many of us today are content to be fat, dumb and happy. With a polyunsaturated diet, the coming thirty five hour week, the fly-now pay-later vacation, and fringe benefits, many of us live in a chromium plated world where the major enemy we face is crabgrass. ~ John H. Glenn Jr
  • It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it. ~ Mark Twain
  • Of course, America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up. ~ Oscar Wilde
  • It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners. ~ Oscar Wilde
  • Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected. ~ Oscar Wilde
  • It is only in the upper-class level that each husband sits next to the other man’s wife. ~ Louis Kronenberger
  • This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum. ~ Elbert Hubbard
  • The United States is the greatest law factory the world has ever known. ~ Charles Evans Hughes
  • America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization. ~ Georges Clemenceau
  • The last abode of romance and other medieval phenomena. ~ Eric Linklater
  • I think the American public wants a solemn ass as a President And I think I'll go along with them. ~ Calvin Coolidge
  • The United States never lost a war or won a conference. ~ Will Rogers
  • No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. ~ H L Mencken
  • America is a young country with an old mentality. ~ George Santayana
  • Some Americans need hyphens in their name because only part of them has come over. ~ Woodrow Wilson
  • Some American delusions
  1. That there is no class consciousness in the country
  2. That American coffee is good
  3. That Americans are businesslike
  4. That Americans are highly sexed and that redheads are more highly sexed than others. ~ W Somerset Maugham
  • "The American nation in the Sixth Ward is a fine people," he says. "They love th' eagle," he says, — "on the back iv a dollar." ~ Finley Peter Dunne
  • The French look exactly like French, the faces of Dutchmen are Dutch, Danes look like Danes and Egyptians look very Canalish. Americans have a sad countenance. They probably look like this because they developed catarrh when they landed on Plymouth Rock. ~ Sir Alfred Richardson
  • I am willing to love all mankind except an American. ~ Samuel Johnson
  • The Americans, like the English probably make love worse than any other race. ~ Walt Whitman
  • The 100 percent American is 99 percent an idiot. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Anonymous

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  • The silver swan, who living had no note,
    When death approached unlocked her silent throat;
    Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
    Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
    Farewell, all joys; O death, come close mine eyes;
    More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.
  • Add more anonymous English lyrics...
  • Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live on in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
  • If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
    • Harry S. Truman, White House Press Release Announcing the Bombing of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945); this announcement was based largely on a draft of July 31, by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson
  • ?
    • ?
Politics of the United States
  • Alien, n. An American sovereign in his probationary state.
  • Alligator, n. The crocodile of America, superior in every detail to the crocodile of the effete monarchies of the Old World. Herodotus says the Indus is, with one exception, the only river that produces crocodiles, but they appear to have gone West and grown up with the other rivers.
  • Consul, n. In American politics, a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.
  • Dejeuner, n. The breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.
  • Delegation, n. In American politics, an article of merchandise that comes in sets.
  • Dullard, n. Since a detachment of Dullards came over with the Pilgrims in the Mayflower and made a favorable report of the country, their increase by birth, immigration, and conversion has been rapid and steady. According to the most trustworthy statistics the number of adult Dullards in the United States is but little short of thirty millions, including the statisticians. The intellectual centre of the race is somewhere about Peoria, Illinois, but the New England Dullard is the most shockingly moral.
  • Finance, n. The pronunciation of this word with the i long and the accent on the first syllable is one of America's most precious discoveries and possessions.
  • Grapeshot, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism.
  • Hangman, n. An officer of the law charged with duties of the highest dignity and utmost gravity, and held in hereditary disesteem by a populace having a criminal ancestry. In some of the American States his functions are now performed by an electrician, as in New Jersey, where executions by electricity have recently been ordered—the first instance known to this lexicographer of anybody questioning the expediency of hanging Jerseymen.
  • Introduction, n. Every American being the equal of every other American, it follows that everybody has the right to know everybody else, which implies the right to introduce without request or permission. The Declaration of Independence should have read thus:
    We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, and the right to make that of another miserable by thrusting upon him an incalculable quantity of acquaintances; liberty, particularly the liberty to introduce persons to one another without first ascertaining if they are not already acquainted as enemies; and the pursuit of another's happiness with a running pack of strangers.
  • Lord, n. In American society, an English tourist above the state of a costermonger, as, lord 'Aberdasher, Lord Hartisan and so forth. The traveling Briton of lesser degree is addressed as "Sir," as, Sir 'Arry Donkiboi, or 'Amstead 'Eath.
  • Mustang, n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.
  • Negro, n. The pièce de résistance in the American political problem. Representing him by the letter n, the Republicans begin to build their equation thus: "Let n = the white man." This, however, appears to give an unsatisfactory solution.
  • Pickaninny, n. The young of the Procyanthropos, or Americanus dominans. It is small, black and charged with political fatalities.
  • Presidency, n. The greased pig in the field game of American politics.
  • President, n. The leading figure in a small group of men of whom—and of whom only—it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for President.
  • Red-skin, n. A North American Indian, whose skin is not red—at least not on the outside.
  • Ramshackle, adj. Pertaining to a certain order of architecture, otherwise known as the Normal American. Most of the public buildings of the United States are of the Ramshackle order, though some of our earlier architects preferred the Ironic. Recent additions to the White House in Washington are Theo-Doric, the ecclesiastic order of the Dorians. They are exceedingly fine and cost one hundred dollars a brick.
  • Rear, n. In American military matters, that exposed part of the army that is nearest to Congress.
  • Recount, n. In American politics, another throw of the dice, accorded to the player against whom they are loaded.
  • Resplendent, adj. Like a simple American citizen beduking himself in his lodge, or affirming his consequence in the Scheme of Things as an elemental unit of a parade.
  • Revolution, n. Specifically, in American history, the substitution of the rule of an Administration for that of a Ministry, whereby the welfare and happiness of the people were advanced a full half-inch.
  • Rostrum, n. In Latin, the beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, virtue and power of the rabble.
  • Sheriff, n. In America the chief executive officer of a county, whose most characteristic duties, in some of the Western and Southern States, are the catching and hanging of rogues.
  • Trust, n. In American politics, a large corporation composed in greater part of thrifty working men, widows of small means, orphans in the care of guardians and the courts, with many similar malefactors and public enemies.
  • Un-American, adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish.
  • Wit, n. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.
  • Yankee, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See Damnyank)
  • Zeus, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have penetrated a considerable distance to the interior, have thought that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists, each having no other god than himself, whom he worships under many sacred names.
Women in the United States
  • Limb, n. The branch of a tree or the leg of an American woman.
  • Mustang, n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.
  • Woman, n. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movement, especially the American variety (felis pugnans).
  • The stockings in holes, the worn-out shoes, the lace in rags, the straggling hair, the sad masks, the notched plates—all made a picture of sumptuous misery hard to be described.
    • Giacomo Casanova, Mémoires (tr. 1894, vol. 4, p. 282
    • Cf. John W. Gardner, No Easy Victories, ed. Helen Rowan (1968), p. 57:
      More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.
    • LOOK FOR SOURCE OF THE PHRASE "SUMPTUOUS MISERY"
  • Mark ruffian Violence, distain'd with crimes,
    Rousing elate in these degenerate times;
    View unsuspecting Innocence a prey,
    As guileful Fraud points out the erring way;
    With subtle Litigation's pliant tongue
    The life-blood equal sucks of Right and Wrong;
    Hark, injured Want recounts the unlisten'd tale,
    And much-wrong'd Misery pours the unpitied wail.
    • Robert Burns, "On the Death of Robert Dundas, Esq., of Arniston", in Alan Cunningham (ed.) Works, with His Life, new ed. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray & Co., 1834), vol. 2, p. 20 [1]
It's simple. I just remove everything that is not David. ~ Michelangelo
  • ... a peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiæ, loosely tied...
  • I am the worm who never turned,
       The eunuch without a harem;
    Between the priest and the commissar
       I walk like Eugene Aram.
  • Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Women
  • Women can’t forgive failure.
More work needed
  • L’extension des priviléges des femmes est le principe gènèral de tous progrés sociaux.
  • His sayings are generally like women’s letters; all the pith is in the postscript.
  • The fundamental situation, whether it deserves to be called ambiguous or not, is that a word or a grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once. To take a famous example, there is no pun, double syntax, or dubiety of feeling, in
         Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,
    but the comparison holds for many reasons; because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, becauce they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choir-boys suits well with Shakespeare’s feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for various sociological and historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

United States

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  • We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.
  • [W]hence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia... could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.
  • In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky — her grand old woods — her fertile fields — her beautiful rivers — her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, ... [w]hen I remember that all is cursed with the infernal actions of slaveholding, robbery and wrong, — when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.
  • No day ever dawns for the slave, nor is it looked for. For the slave it is all night — all night forever.
    • A freed black man
  • I'd ruther be dead than be a nigger on one of these big plantations.
    • A white Mississippian
  • You know what I’d rather do? If I thought… had any idea that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away! Because you’re nothing but a dog. You’re not a thing but a dog! Night never come without you had nothing to do. Time to cut tobacco... if they want you to cut all night long out in the field you cut. And if they want you to hang all night long, you hang…hang tobacco. It didn’t matter about your tired…being tired. You’re afraid to say you’re tired. They just... well...
    • Fountain Hughes [2]
  • There was never a moment during this time when the slavery issue was not a sleeping serpent. That issue lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was, owing to the invention of the cotton gin, more than half awake at the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803; and slavery was continued in the Louisiana Territory by the terms of the treaty. Thereafter slavery was always in everyone's mind, though not always on his tongue.
    • John Jay Chapman [3]
  • South Carolina is too small for a republic, but too large for an insane asylum.
    • James L. Petigru
  • The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers. We have never been a nation. We are only an aggregate of states, ready to fall apart at the first serious shock.
    • George Templeton Strong
  • O dearer than the daylight to thy sister, wilt thou waste, sad and alone, all thy length of youth, and know not the sweetness of motherhood, nor love’s bounty? Deemest thou the ashes care for that, or the ghost within the tomb?

History of Australia

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  • Namaaraalee is highest, he made it all,
    We must keep those ways he pointed out.
  • At its own Wunger place
    A spirit waits for birth.
    • Recounted by Sam Woolagoodjah, elder of the Worrorra people of the Kimberley. Tr. Andrew Huntley from the prose version of Michael Silverstein. Reported in The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986), p. 1
  • Generally young, shallow-brained fellows, proud of their uniform, treating the diggers overbearingly, and bringing down invectives upon the Government through its servants.
    • Mrs Andrew Campbell, wife of the Ballarat police magistrate; Lawrence L. Sharkey, Australia Marches On (Sydney: New South Wales Legal Rights Committee, 1942), p. 282
  • But with all its golden advantages, Australia has yet greater for the emigrant who prefers the comforts and decencies of life to bartering his soul for gold. In Australia, as elsewhere, Mammon carries his curse with him, and his worshippers must partake of it. Drunkenness, debauchery, crime, and immorality, in every shape, are the characteristics of such a society as is now gathering in the gold districts. There are thousands of respectable families in England whose interest it would be to emigrate, but who would not encounter such a condition for all the gold Australia contains.
    • George Butler Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual (London: George Routledge, 1853), p. 2
  • Thank God there is some prospect of a cessation of the cursed gold seeking for some time owing to the creeks becoming dry. The rascals can’t wash [gold] without water ... It is really ludicrous to see the feeling of indifference (not to say contempt) with which everything appertaining to squatters or squatting is now treated in Melbourne ... They will not always remain under a cloud. The profits of labor will be equalized in time while we have a monopoly of the land which with the help of God we will keep in spite of the Melbourne gold worshippers. Our time will come yet, land will tell in the long run. No one can blame us using any powers circumstances may place within our reach. We are the victims at present, let us hope we shall be the sacrificers by & bye.
    • Squatter William Forlonge to C. Barnes (late 1851); W. Forlonge to C. Barnes, 30 December 1851, pp. 3-4, SLV, MS Box 111/5: reported in Peter FitzSimons, Eureka: The Unfinished Revolution (2012), ch. 4, epigraph
  • [Outsiders] cannot imagine the state of things here. Men who have been servants all their lives are now, after a few weeks work at the diggings, independent.
    • Victorian squatter Alfred Burchett (January 1852); Gregory Blake, To Pierce the Tyrant’s Heart (Loftus: Australian Military History Publications, 2009), p. 12
  • All aristocratic feelings and associations of the old country are at once annihilated ... It is not what you were, but what you are that is the criterion.
    • John Sherer, an English digger; The Gold-Finder of Australia: How He Went, How He Fared, and How He Made his Fortune (London: Clarke, Beeton & Co., 1853), p. 10
  • It is every man’s business to take care of himself here. They are just as independent in their speech as in their actions. It is a wonderful place to take the conceit out of men who expect much deference. The Governor was yesterday riding along among this crew, attended by one soldier; but not the slightest notice was taken of him, not even by a touch of the hat. They are just as free in helping themselves to your property.
    • William Howitt, describing Melbourne in 1852; Land, Labour, and Gold, or Two Years in Victoria with Visits to Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, 1855), p. 25
  • Rossinhol en son repaire
    M' iras ma dona vezer;
    E ill diguas lo mieu afaire, ...
    • Go, nightingale, and find the beauty I adore;
      My heart to her outpour:
         Bid her each feeling tell,
         And bid her charge thee well,
      To say that she forgets me not.
    • Ascribed to Dalfi d'Alvernha in M. Raynouard, Choix des poésies originales des troubadours, vol. 5 (1820), p. 292. Versified from Sainte-Palaye Millot French prose translation and ascribed to Peire d'Alvernhe in Edgar Taylor, Lays of the Minnesingers (1825), p. 243
  • Her Eye-Brows from a Mouse’s Hyde,
    Stuck on with Art on either Side,
    Pulls off with Care, and first displays ’em,
    Then in a Play-Book smoothly lays ’em.
  • Moe: Listen, Bustoff, you can't drink that! That's alcohol.
    Bustoff: No, that's not alcohol. That's just a little tequila, vodka, and cognac.
    Curly: Oh, that's different. Go ahead!
  • On sleds reclin’d, the furry Russian sits;
    And, by his rain-deer drawn, behind him throws
    A shining kingdom in a winter’s day.
  • They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it—horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia, China, cloudless and interminable.
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