Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Ambrose

Cold-blooded in its plainness, Ambrose’s line works because it refuses the comfort of euphemism. “Guiding principle” sounds like a sober policy memo, the kind of phrase you’d use for a tax code or a logistics plan. Then it drops the real operating logic: promise “anything” as a tactic, not a pledge, with the only non-negotiable outcome being removal. The sentence is built like a trapdoor. You start in bureaucracy and land in dispossession.

Ambrose isn’t describing a single bad actor so much as a governing habit: expansion as administration, conquest as paperwork. The subtext is that the moral language of treaty-making and “negotiation” often functioned as a lubricant for inevitability. If the outcome is predetermined - “just so long as they get out of the way” - then the promises are not political commitments but instruments, a way to convert force into something that can be filed, signed, and later forgotten.

Context matters: this is the logic that underwrote repeated treaty violations, coerced removals, and the broader U.S. project of turning Native nations into obstacles rather than sovereign peoples. Ambrose’s historian’s voice is deliberately unadorned, almost reportorial, which is precisely why it stings. By compressing the policy into a single cynical maxim, he exposes how “westward expansion” can be retold as destiny, when it was often strategy: make commitments you don’t intend to keep, so the land changes hands with minimal friction and maximal plausible deniability.