Territory Quotes - page 21
A Puerto Rican writer from New York is doubly dislocated: first, there is dislocation from Puerto Rico; secondly, there is Puerto Rico's dislocation from itself. Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. It may be a truism that you can't go home again, but it's especially true when home is an occupied territory. A Puerto Rican writer from New York, like myself, is twice alienated. I never forget that in this country I belong to a marginalized, silenced, even despised community; yet, in Puerto Rico, as a "Nuyorican” poet, I am marginalized again, for reasons related and unrelated to the island's colonial status...
Martín Espada
The population of these Pueblos will average nearly five hundred souls each (though some hardly exceed one hundred), making an aggregate of nine or ten thousand. At the time of the original conquest, at the close of the sixteenth century, they were, as has been mentioned, much, perhaps ten-fold, more numerous. Ancient ruins are now to be seen scattered in every quarter of the territory: of some, entire stone walls are yet standing, while others are nearly or quite obliterated, many of them being now only known by their names which history or tradition has preserved to us.
Josiah Gregg
By an observation of an eclipse of one of Jupiter's satellites, on the night of the 25th of March, in latitude 350° 51' 30", I found that we were very near the 100th degree of longitude west from Greenwich. On the following day, therefore, we celebrated our entrance into the United States territory. Those who have never been beyond the purlieus of the land of their nativity, can form but a poor conception of the joy which the wanderer in distant climes experiences on treading once more upon his own native soil! Although we were yet far from the abodes of civilization, and further still from home, nevertheless the heart within us thrilled with exhilarating sensations; for we were again in our own territory, breathed our own free atmosphere, and were fairly out of reach of the arbitrary power which we had left behind us.
Josiah Gregg
As the complexion of European politics seems now (from letters I have received from the Marqs. de la Fayette, Chevrs. Chartellux, De la Luzerne, &c.,) to have a tendency to Peace, I will say nothing of war, nor make any animadversions upon the contending powers; otherwise, I might possibly have said that the retreat from it seemed impossible after the explicit declaration of the parties: My first wish is to see this plague to mankind banished from off the Earth, and the sons and Daughters of this world employed in more pleasing and innocent amusements, than in preparing implements and exercising them for the destruction of mankind: rather than quarrel about territory let the poor, the needy and oppressed of the Earth, and those who want Land, resort to the fertile plains of our western country, the second Promise, and there dwell in peace, fulfilling the first and great commandment.
George Washington
First, is the danger of futility: the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills - against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant Reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. "Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the world." These men moved the world, and so can we all.
Robert F. Kennedy
Long centuries before any foreigner had settled in India, the unity of the country was materialised in symbols. What more suggestive story than that, for instance, of Sati, Siva's wife, whose body, divided, after her death, in fifty-one pieces, is lying still in fifty-one different places, therefore revered as "tirthasthans,” throughout the Indian Peninsula? One lies near Peshawar, one in Kamakhya, not far from India's eastern boundaries; one in Benares, one in the very extreme South, others here and there. Fifty-one pieces, but one body; fifty-one "tirthasthans” in the name of the same Goddess, scattered over the same territory. Indeed, among the different interpretations that can be given of the legend of Sati, one can take it in this light: Sati is India herself, personified; India's soil, sacred from end to end, is, with all its variety, the actual body of one great Goddess... And Indian nationalism means: devotion to this great Goddess.
Savitri Devi