"The present King of Great Britain...has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers; the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." ---Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence.
"Indians have nothing human except the shape ...the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape. They are wolves and beasts who deserved nothing from the whites but 'total ruin'."---George Washington, 1783.
"Root them out from their 'dens' and kill the women and their 'whelps'." ---Andrew Jackson.
"We are obliged "...to pursue [Indians] to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach."---Thomas Jefferson.
"It needs but little familiarity with the actual, palpable aborigines to convince anyone that the poetic Indian—the Indian of Cooper and Longfellow—is only visible to the poet's eye. To the prosaic observer, the average Indian of the woods and prairies is a being who does little credit to human nature—a slave of appetite and sloth, never emancipated from the tyranny of one animal passion save by the more ravenous demands of another."---Horace Greeley.
"If the savage resists, civilization, with the Ten Commandments in one hand and the sword in the other, demands his immediate execution."---Andrew Johnson, Message to Congress, 1867.
"The idea that a handful of wild, half-naked, thieving, plundering, murdering savages should be dignified with the sovereign attributes of nations, enter into solemn treaties, and claim a country 500 miles wide by 1,000 miles long as theirs in fee simple, because they hunted buffalo or antelope over it, might do for a beautiful reading of Hiawatha, but is unsuited to the intelligence and justice of this age, or the natural rights of mankind."---New Mexico Supreme Court, United States v. Lucero, 1 NM S. Ct. 422, 1869.
"I suppose I should be ashamed to say that I take the Western view of the Indian. I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. "---Theodore Roosevelt.
"All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership."---Theodore Roosevelt.
"Why did Yankees almost instantly discover gold in California, which had been trodden upon and overlooked by Indians and Mexican greasers for centuries?”---Abe Lincoln, "Lecture on Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements, Springfield, Illinois, February 22, 1860.
