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Pioneers

  • I am not belittling the brave pioneer men, but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours.

  • A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.

  • Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.

  • No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept.

    • Gertrude Stein,
    • "Composition as Explanation" (1926), What Are Masterpieces ()
  • She was the true pioneer type — the one who is destined never to eat the fruits of the vineyards she has planted.

  • You cannot settle a new country without suffering, exposure, and danger. Cheerful endurance of hardships and contempt of surroundings become a virtue in a pioneer. Comfort is a comparatively new thing in the United States.

  • Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.

  • I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.

  • It's not always as comfortable blazing the trail as it is walking on it.

  • Pioneering is the work of individuals ...

  • [On being first black woman to earn a PhD in economics and first black woman admitted to Pennsylvania bar:] I never looked for anybody to hold the door open for me. I knew well that the only way I could get that door open was to knock it down: because I knocked all of them down.

  • [Life] was mighty easy for the men and horses, but death on cattle and women.

    • Anonymous,
    • Iowa woman during the westward expansion, in Robin Morgan, Sisterhood Is Forever ()
  • To the Pilgrim Mothers, who not only had their full share of the hardships and privations of pioneer life but also had the Pilgrim Fathers to endure.

    • Fanny Fern,
    • toast following a toast to the Pilgrim Fathers, in Prosper Cravath et al., Early Annals of Whitewater 1837-1867 ()
  • It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen stream who is cut sharpest by the ice; those who follow him find it broken, and the last find it gone. It is the men or women who first tread down the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow, who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is deadly.