The Morrow Book of Quotations in American History

use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that such supervision is almost entirely nominal. The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.

(On the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act, 1888)

Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.

(Note to the British Foreign Office on the occasion of the Venezuela British Guiana boundary dispute, July 1895)

Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953): Playwright

We talk about the American Dream, and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that Dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States for this reason is the greatest failure the world has ever seen.

(Attributed)

J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967): Nuclear scientist

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

(Quoting a Hindu scripture to himself while witnessing the explosion of the first atomic bomb, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 16 July 1945)

The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

( Lecture, 25 November 1947)

John L. O'Sullivan (1813-1895): Democratic Party journalist

Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.

( Democratic Review, July 1845)

Texas has been absorbed into the Union in this inevitable fulfillment of the general law which is rolling our population westward; the connexion of which with that ratio of growth in population which is destined within a hundred years to swell our numbers to the enormous population of two hundred and fifty million (if not more), is too

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