Continental Expansion Quotes

I will not hide from you my intention to unite Holland with France, both to complete my territory and as the deadliest blow I can inflict on England.

We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is Manifest Destiny.

It is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand … and cover the whole northern if not the southern continent.

We must march from ocean to ocean .... We must march from Texas straight to the Pacific Ocean, and be bounded only by its roaring wave .... It is the destiny of the white race, it is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Sir, our natural boundary is the Pacific Ocean. The swelling tide of our population must and will roll on until that mighty ocean interposes its waters, and limits our territorial empire.

The President [Thomas Jefferson] has been all his life a man of letters, very speculative and a lover of glory, and it would be possible he might attempt to perpetuate the fame of his administration … by discovering … the way by which Americans may some day extend their population and their influence up to the Pacific Ocean

[America should be a] nation, coextensive with the North American continent, destined by God and nature to be the most populous and powerful people ever combined under one social compact.

People began to understand that with the acquisition of California the nation had obtained practically half a continent, of which the future possibilities were almost unlimited, so far as the development of natural resources and the genera production of wealth were concerned.

The transformation of part of the northern part of this continent into "America" inaugurated a nearly boundless epoch of opportunity and innovation, and thus deserves to be celebrated with great vim and gusto, with or without the participation of those who wish they had never been born.

Europe started out with six countries; three small countries and three large countries.

We are destined to own and control the whole western continent from Baffin's bay to the Caribbean sea ... we need not be in a hurry. When the fruit is ripe, it will fall into our hands.

America’s ancestors give them the love of equality and of freedom, but God Himself gave them the means of remaining equal and free by placing them upon a boundless continent.

To a more perfect Union embracing the whole of the North American continent.

Railways, multiplied and spanning the continent, are essential domestic institutions -- more powerful and more permanent than law, or popular consent, or political constitutions... They thoroughly complete the grand system... which fraternizes us into one people.

It is, beyond question, the destiny of our race to spread themselves over the continent of North America, and this at no distant day.

The major challenge for the United States is whether it can become the first outward-looking, continental, nonimperialist power in history.

Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.

From Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound, the first priority of the men and women who settled this vast and blessed continent was to put a roof over the heads of their family. And that priority has never, and can never, change.