A garland of quotations XLIII
Culled from the finest jingos in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
Of all Sun Myung Moon’s sins, I thought, his attacks on America were the most vile.
•Nansook Hong, In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Family (1998).
Thus in the beginning all the world was America.
•Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690).
The ancients did not discover America, but they invented it.
•Eduard Ebner, quoted in de Camp & Ley, Lands Beyond (1952).
No English pioneers. No French. No European pioneer-poets. In Europe the would-be pioneers are mere innovators.
•D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923).
An American who has not a bowie-knife in his pocket is no longer an American.
•Jules Verne, Robur the Conqueror (1886).
Hurrah for Peter Parley!
Hurrah for Daniel Boone!
Three cheers, sir, for the gentleman
Who first observed the moon!
• Emily Dickinson, “St. Valentine—’52” (1852).
When Daniel Boone goes by, at night,
The phantom deer arise
And all lost, wild America
Is burning in their eyes.
•Stephen Vincent Benét, ”Daniel Boone” (1933).
Of all men, saving Sylla the man-slayer,
Who passes for in life and death most lucky,
Of the great names which in our faces stare,
The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky,
Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere;
For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he
Enjoy’d the lonely, vigorous, harmless days
Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze.
•Byron, Don Juan VIII (1823)
LATHER WAS USED
BY DANIEL BOONE
HE LIVED
A 100 YEARS
TOO SOON
BURMA-SHAVE
•1934 ad.
He’s just on the job, steady as iron, cool as a cucumber and confident as an American.
•H. Irving Hancock, The High School Pitcher, or Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond (1910).
References: Verne: from the omnibus volume Master of the World (Ace, 1951); Dickinson: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little Brown, 1976); Burma-Shave: in Frank Rowsome, Verse by the Side of the Road (Stephen Greene, 1965); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.