[In the old religion of the Indians in New Mexico] the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into direct contact with the e...lemental life of the cosmos.... To come into immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Mem...phis,--is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and Now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of Stat...es. The control which, with Florida, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No troop or squadron or regiment's gonna keep the Apaches on this reservation unless they want to stay here. Five years ago we mad...e a treaty with Cochise. He and his Cherokowas and some of the other Apache bands came on the reservation. They wanted to live here in peace and did for two years. And then Meacham, here, was sent by the Indian ring, the dirtiest, most corrupt political group in our history. And then it began--whiskey but no beef, trinkets instead of blankets, the women degraded, the children sickly, and the men turning into drunken animals. So Cochise did the only thing a decent man could do. He left. Took most of his people and crossed the Rio Bravo into Mexico.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mexico is a nineteenth-century country arranged for gaslight. Once brought into the harsh light of the twentieth-century media, Me...xico can only seem false. In its male, in its public, its city aspect, Mexico is an arch-tranvestite, a tragic buffoon. Dogs bark and babies cry when Mother Mexico walks abroad in the light of day. The policeman, the Marxist mayor--Mother Mexico doesn't even bother to shave her mustachios. Swords and rifles and spurs and bags of money chink and clatter beneath her skirts. A chain of martyred priests dangles from her waist, for she is an austere, pious lady. Ay, how much--clutching her jangling bosoms; spilling cigars--how much she has suffered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not wish, it happens, to be associated with Massachusetts, either in holding slaves or in conquering Mexico. I am a little be...tter than herself in these respects.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »