Columbus Day

In all parts of the Old World, as well as of the New, it was evident that Columbus had kindled a fire in every mariner's heart.  That fire was the harbinger of a new era, for it was not to be extinguished.  ~Charles Kendall Adams


Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.  ~Robert F. Kennedy


A ship in harbor is safe - but that is not what ships are for.  ~John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic


I also hate those holidays that fall on a Monday where you don't get mail, those fake holidays like Columbus Day.  What did Christopher Columbus do, discover America?  If he hadn't, somebody else would have and we'd still be here.  Big deal.  ~John Waters, quoted in The Portable Curmudgeon Redux, compiled & edited by Jon Winokur, 1992


One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.  ~André Gide


When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, "Ours."  ~Vine Deloria, Jr.


He completed the universe, he achieved the physical unity of the globe.  ~Lamartine


Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies.
~George Santayana


What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.  ~Margot Asquith


Columbus had all the spirit of a crusader, and, at the same time, the investigating nature of a modern man of science.  ~Edmund Arthur Helps


Whose indomitable spirit changed the face of the earth for us.  ~Edmund Arthur Helps


If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock.  ~Arthur Goldberg


Every one of us has in him a continent of undiscovered character.  Blessed is he who acts the Columbus to his own soul.  ~Author Unknown


His bark
The daring mariner shall urge far o'er
The Western wave, a smooth and level plain,
Albeit the earth is fashioned like a wheel.
~Luigi Pulci


He gave the world another world.  ~George Santayana


So Columbus said, somebody show me the sunset and somebody did and he set sail for it,
And he discovered America and they put him in jail for it,
And the fetters gave him welts,
And they named America after somebody else.
~Ogden Nash, Columbus


Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.  ~John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 1929


America's one of the finest countries anyone ever stole.  ~Bobcat Goldthwaite


We shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led to the way to this New World as the most epoch-making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ.  ~John Fiske


For all mankind that unstained scroll unfurled,
Where God might write anew the story of the World.
~Edward Everett Hale


With this humble instrumentality did it please Providence to prepare the theatre for those events by which a new dispensation of liberty was to be communicated to man.  ~Edward Everett


Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.  ~Author Unknown


Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered.  I myself would say that it had merely been detected.  ~Oscar Wilde


Aborigines, n.:  Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country.  They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


He gained a world; he gave that world
Its grandest lesson:  "On! sail on!"
~Joaquin Miller


He stands in history as the completer of the globe.  ~John Sterling


Columbus went around the world in 1492.  That isn't a lot of strokes when you consider the course.  ~Lee Trevino


Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States.  Ask any Indian.  ~Robert Orben


Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge.  ~Author Unknown


The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.  ~Marcel Proust


Columbus dreamed of an unknown shore,
At the rim of a far-flung sky.
~Author Unknown


He stands out among the beacon lights of history as a man of vision dominated by a definite purpose.  ~John George Jones


Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things.  ~Aldous Huxley, "Wordsworth in the Tropics"


Was this his face, and these the finding eyes
That plucked a new world from the rolling seas?
~George Edward Woodberry


Mistakes are the portals of discovery.  ~James Joyce


The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it.  ~Robert L. Park, in The New York Times, 7 December 1999


Hardly a name in profane history is more august than his.  Hardly another character in the world's record has made so little of its opportunities.  His discovery was a blunder; his blunder was a new world; the New World is his monument!  ~Justin Winsor


What faith in man must in our new world beat,
Thinking how once he saw before his face
The west and all the host of stars retreat
Into the silent infinite of space!
~George Edward Woodberry


He leaves in the background of fame all other navigators whose names are written in the priceless annals of discovery.  ~Emilio Castelar