Quotes from Adam Hochschild

the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." And

Just as Europeans would be long obsessed with African cannibalism, so Africans imagined Europeans practicing the same thing.

His Majesty displays the pretensions and naïve selfishness of an Italian who considers that his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything.

Henry Morton Stanley

one-eyed people who used their feet to cover their heads. A

Sorry, but they're burning the State archives." The furnaces burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke in the sky over Brussels. "I will give them my Congo," Leopold told Stinglhamber, "but they have no right to know what I did there.

The city of Detroit slaughtered the animals in its zoo to provide meat for the hungry.

Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl): "Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot. . . . "Signed The Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, von Trotha.

The others had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were

The others had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were shot, or—to economize on bullets—bayoneted or clubbed to death with rifle stocks.

about 80 percent of the entire land area of Africa was still under indigenous rulers.

The American poet Vachel Lindsay declaimed:   Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. Hear how the demons chuckle and yell Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recognized that a colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitarian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits. In 1876, he began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and advance his African ambitions: he would host a conference of explorers and geographers.

His frustrations are concealed, his raw lust for colonies moderated by the knowledge that he must depend on subterfuge and flattery.

BOTH IN Africa and Europe, Leopold's death had promised to mark the end of an era. Many Belgians felt relieved; at last they would be rid of the multiple embarrassments of his youthful mistress, his unseemly quarrels with his daughters, and the sheer nakedness of his greed. But it was soon clear that Leopold's ghost would not vanish so easily. The king who had died while in possession of one of Europe's largest fortunes had tried to take it with him.

The very people who are most ardent against entangling alliances insist most fanatically upon our doing one hundred things a year on humanitarian grounds. . . .

He produced the first printed catalogue of ceramics and gave each new line of products an aura of desirability through a by-invitation-only opening in his London showroom. Nearly two centuries before Hollywood discovered "product placement," he arranged for his vases to appear in works by well-known painters.

Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. Aldrich, a multimillionaire, a card-playing partner of J. Pierpont Morgan, the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was the ultimate Washington power broker. "I'm just a president," Roosevelt once told the journalist Lincoln Steffens, "and he has seen lots of presidents.

Whenever Mosley was heckled at one of his rallies, he stopped speaking and searchlights focused on the heckler as jackbooted men beat him and then threw him out of the hall.

those who made the greatest fortunes from the Scramble for Africa, like Leopold, were often men who had fortunes to begin with.

We'd rip out the hedges and burn the hooches and blow all the wells and kill every chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, if we can't shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here?

During and after the war, though, no one in the Allied countries wanted to be reminded that, only a decade or two earlier, it was the King of the Belgians whose men in Africa had cut off hands. And

The millions of words that would flow from his pen over the remainder of his life came in a handwriting that raced across the page in bold, forward-slanting lines, flattened by speed, as if they had no time to spare in reaching their destination.

Trapped with his men in no man's land, Hutchison saw, to his amazement, "a squadron of Indian Cavalry, dark faces under glistening helmets, galloping across the valley towards the slope. No troops could have presented a more inspiring sight than these natives of India with lance and sword, tearing in mad cavalcade on to the skyline. A few disappeared over it: they never came back. The remainder became the target of every gun and rifle.