The True Flag Quotes

“We based our government on the doctrine promulgated in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created free and equal and are by nature entitled to certain inalienable rights, which are mentioned in the declaration. We did not say that all men in the United States were born free and equal, but we said that all men, wherever they are born, stand on terms of equality.…”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“No man is good enough to govern another man without the other’s consent.”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“The day’s most vivid exchanges were about a delicate but serious matter: the extreme foreignness of native Hawaiians. Both sides used racial arguments. Annexationists said the islanders’ evident savagery made it urgent for a civilizing force to take their country and uplift them. Opponents countered that it would be madness to bring such savages into union with the United States, where they could corrupt white people.”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“In a ravenous fifty-five-day spasm during the summer of 1898, the United States asserted control over five far-flung lands with a total of 11 million inhabitants: Guam, Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Never in history has a nation leaped so suddenly to overseas empire. At”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“There was no response. Soon afterward, a skiff flying the Spanish flag approached the Charleston. Two Spanish officers came aboard and apologized for not having returned the American “salute” because they had no gunpowder left in their arsenal. It turned out that they had not been resupplied for months and did not know the United States and Spain were at war. The next morning an American lieutenant went ashore. At 10:15 he handed the Spanish commandant a message demanding surrender of the island within thirty minutes. The commandant retired to his quarters. Twenty-nine minutes later he emerged with a reply. “Being without defenses of any kind and without any means for meeting the present situation,” he had written, “I am under the sad necessity of being unable to resist such superior forces and regretfully accede to your demands.”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work. Trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on, the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“It is cheering to find a newspaper of the great influence and circulation of the Journal that tells the facts as they exist, and ignores the suggestions of various kinds that emanate from sources that cannot be described as patriotic or loyal to the flag.”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“The man who in times of popular excitement boldly and unflinchingly resists hot-tempered clamor for an unnecessary war, and thus exposes himself to the opprobrious imputation of a lack of patriotism or of courage, to the end of saving his country from a great calamity, is, as to ‘loving and faithfully serving his country,’ at least as good a patriot as the hero of the most daring feat of arms,” Schurz”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” In”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“He was, as the novelist and muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair wrote, “willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war.”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“There are those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them. You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies.… We will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire