An unusual result for a name this heavily forged: he really said it, word for word. Powell delivered the sentence on 14 February 2002 during Be Heard, MTV’s globally televised town hall, answering a young woman in the London studio who asked how it felt to represent a country some call the “satan of contemporary politics.” The State Department’s own transcript ↗ carries it verbatim. The version the internet usually cites — a 2003 exchange at Davos with a retired Archbishop of Canterbury — is a different, looser wording of the same idea.
“The only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead” Colin Powell, "Be Heard: An MTV Global Discussion With Colin Powell" — Washington, D.C., 14 February 2002 (U.S. Department of State transcript). Not, as usually claimed, his 2003 Davos exchange with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, where he worded it differently. Verified at quotle.info. · Verbatim: “The only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead. And that is the kind of nation we are.”
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In context
Evoking the world of Colin Powell — U.S. Army general · Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989–1993 · Secretary of State, 2001–2005. Theme: "The only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
The source
Occasion
“Be Heard: An MTV Global Discussion With Colin Powell”
Speaker
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, answering a questioner in the London studio
Date
14 February 2002
Location
Washington, D.C., linked by satellite to MTV studios in London, Moscow, New Delhi, Milan, Cairo and São Paulo
And when all those conflicts were over, what did we do? Did we stay and conquer? Did we say, “Okay, we defeated Germany. Now Germany belongs to us? We defeated Japan, so Japan belongs to us”? No. What did we do? We built them up. We gave them democratic systems which they have embraced totally to their soul. And did we ask for any land? No, the only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead. And that is the kind of nation we are.
from the State Department transcript
The question that prompted it was hostile: a young woman in the London studio — the first overseas questioner of the ninety-minute forum — asked Powell how it felt to represent a country perceived as the “satan of contemporary politics.” He began by rejecting the characterization, then built to “so, far from being the Great Satan, I would say that we are the Great Protector,” and ran through Fascism, Communism, Korea and Vietnam before landing on this line.
The State Department’s archived transcript ↗ of the MTV forum, headed “Secretary Colin L. Powell, Washington, DC, February 14, 2002,” contains the sentence exactly as it is quoted today.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos on 26 January 2003, Powell reached for the same idea in different words, telling George Carey that America has “asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in” — preserved in the full Davos transcript ↗ and in the State Department’s page of excerpts from the reply to Carey ↗.
Snopes ↗ (24 March 2003) rated the chain-email version True while noting that “the context in which it was delivered has been greatly simplified,” and Truth or Fiction ↗ rates it Mostly Truth, reaching the same conclusion.
The idea predates Powell, though the stone does not: the American Battle Monuments Commission’s list of inscriptions at the Normandy visitor center ↗ credits “all we asked … was enough … soil in which to bury our gallant dead” to Gen. Mark W. Clark, who chaired the commission from 1969 to 1984. That inscription went up when the visitor center was dedicated on 6 June 2007, five years after Powell spoke, and the ABMC page gives no date for when Clark first said the words.
✓Public domain
These are the official remarks of a sitting U.S. Secretary of State, published in the State Department’s own transcript — a work of the U.S. federal government, which under 17 U.S.C. § 105 carries no copyright and is in the public domain. (The MTV broadcast itself is a separate commercial production; it is the government transcript of Powell’s words that is free to reuse.)
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
How it gets garbled
The sentence is genuine, but almost every detail attached to it in circulation is wrong. A chain email that spread during the run-up to the Iraq war rewrote the wording, moved the venue, promoted the questioner and invented the question — and quote sites have been copying that version ever since.
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The wordingThe chain email paraphrase
The email quotes Powell as saying “the only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.” That polished sentence matches neither transcript. Snopes prints it as the claim ↗, then sets the actual transcript beside it.
✕
The occasionDavos, January 2003 wrong event
Quote sites routinely pin this exact sentence to Powell’s Davos exchange with George Carey. But the Davos transcript ↗ reads “we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in.” The wording quoted here belongs to the MTV forum of 14 February 2002.
✕
The setting and the questioner“The Archbishop of Canterbury, in England” wrong on both counts
The email places the exchange at a conference in England, with the sitting Archbishop asking whether Iraq was “empire building.” In the transcript the questioner introduces himself as “George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury … now happily retired,” the venue is Davos, Switzerland, and his question is about hard power versus soft power — as Truth or Fiction spells out ↗.
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The ideaGen. Mark W. Clark earlier formulation
Powell was not the first to put it this way. The American Battle Monuments Commission credits the Normandy inscription — “all we asked … was enough … soil in which to bury our gallant dead” — to Gen. Mark W. Clark ↗, the Second World War Italy commander who chaired the commission from 1969 to 1984. Whether Powell knew the line or arrived at it independently is not documented.
✓Powell really said it, in exactly these words — on 14 February 2002, on MTV, answering a hostile question from a London studio. The State Department transcript ↗ is the receipt.
Context
Why it landed
Five months after 9/11, MTV put the Secretary of State in a Washington studio, wired him to young audiences in six countries and let them ask anything. The first question from the London studio was how it felt to represent a country perceived as the “satan of contemporary politics.” Powell’s reply is a compressed argument about American war aims: we defeated Germany and Japan and did not keep them, we rebuilt them instead, and the only territory we took home was grave plots.
It is a rhetorical move with real history behind it — the same claim is carved into the wall at the Normandy visitor center, credited to Gen. Mark W. Clark. What made Powell’s version travel was the messenger: a four-star general turned diplomat making the case for American restraint to teenagers, live, across six studios of grievance.
And did we ask for any land? No, the only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead.
Read the full story
Powell reached for the thought again at Davos on 26 January 2003, answering the retired Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey on hard power versus soft power. That reply is longer and less quotable — “we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in” — but it is the exchange that went viral, because a chain email attached a smoothed-up rewrite to it and added a dramatic pin-drop silence that appears in no transcript.
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1937–2021 · U.S. Army general · Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989–1993 · Secretary of State, 2001–2005
Born in Harlem in 1937 to Jamaican immigrant parents, Colin Powell rose through the U.S. Army to four-star general and became the first Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, steering the Gulf War before stepping down in 1993. He returned to government as George W. Bush’s Secretary of State, where he was the administration’s most trusted public face — and where his 2003 presentation of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction to the UN Security Council became, in his own later word, a “blot” on his record. He died in 2021.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this
Colin L. Powell, “Be Heard: An MTV Global Discussion With Colin Powell” (remarks, Washington, DC, February 14, 2002), U.S. Department of State Archive, https://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2002/8038.htm.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead’?” Last verified 18 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-only-land-we-ever-asked-for-was-enough-land-to-bury-our/