America, América Quotes

“The United States, Bolívar said, “seem destined by Providence to plague America with torments in the name of liberty.”
― Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World

“I say, a little bit in jest but also quite seriously,” he told an interviewer before going underground, “that the Catholic who is not revolutionary, who is not with the revolution, is living in mortal sin.”[”
― Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World

“crisis was systemic, a feature of a global economy in which the prosperity—and the good, strong coffee that started a workingman’s day—of the core depended on the poverty of the periphery.”
― Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World

“In El Salvador in late January 1932, over a three-day period, local priests helped the military mount a pacification campaign against a rural uprising that murdered tens of thousands of indigenous peasants. The clerics heard the confessions of left-wing peasants and then used the information to draw up death lists to pass on to the military. Accused subversives were lined up in front of church and cemetery walls and executed by firing squad, their blood left on the whitewash for weeks as a warning to other would-be rebels.[20]”
― Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World

“So before London could fully move outward it first committed to establishing authority over its own hinterlands, to populating Catholic lands in Ireland with Welsh and English Protestants. The military campaign was horrifying, with English troops setting themselves on the Irish as if their opponents were less than humans, their lives worth little. Such terror prompted few qualms, neither among England’s establishment Anglican priests or dissident Puritan divines,”
― Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World

“God gave me this ability,” he once said, “to use words to float the good to heaven and sink the bad to hell.”
― Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World

“the centrality of slavery in underwriting liberty. The extraction of the world’s resources—the coin, food, and commodities needed to keep up the growth rate of an expanding world economy—produced the wealth that allowed more and more Europeans and European settlers to enjoy more freedom. Slavery (not the old feudal-servant slavery of Las Casas’s Mediterranean childhood, but a new system in which humans as property provided the labor for large-scale debt-capitalized, export-oriented plantations) was as essential to the emergence of bourgeois order as was the right of commerce and communication and the freedom of the seas.”
― Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World

“the centrality of slavery in underwriting liberty.”
― Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World