Sound Bites -- Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio commentary)

331-333 of 333 Sound Bites. [show all]

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331) The diminishing of their [the Spanish] forces by seas is done either by open hostility, or by some colorable means, as by giving of license under letters patent to discover and inhabit some strange place, with a special provision for their safety whom policy requireth to have most annoyed by which means the doing of the contrary shall be imputed to the executors' fault; your highness' letter patents being a manifest show that it was not your Majesty's pleasure so to have it. (Sir Humphrey Gilbert, A Discourse how her Majesty may Annoy the King of Spain, 1577, reprinted in David B. Quinn, The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Vol. 1.  London: Glasgow UP, 1940: 171. )

332) [In the state of nature] there is no place for industry . . . no knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of time; no Arts; no Letters; no society; and which is worst of all; continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. . . . the savage people in many places of America . . . have no government at all, and live at this day in that brutish manner as I said before. (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651).)

333) [The Indians] are rich in land and poor in all the comforts of life; whom nature having furnished as liberally as any other people with materials of plenty, i.e., a fruitful soil, apt to produce in abundance what might serve for good, raiment and delight, yet for want of improving it by labor have not one-hundreth part of the conveniences we enjoy. And a king of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-laborer in England. (John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (1690).)