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Quotes About Imperialism

arrested me, and he stood by civilly, holding a half-pint champagne bottle (medical comforts) with the candle stuck in it. To my question he said Mr. Kurtz had painted this—in this very station more than a year ago—while waiting for means to go to his trading-post. 'Tell me, pray,' said I, 'who is this Mr. Kurtz?
~ Joseph Conrad
Both these white men looked on native life as a mere play of shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race could walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its incomprehensible aims and needs.
~ Joseph Conrad
L'incapacité à reconnaître les processus culturels spécifiques de l'oppression de genre elle-même n'est-elle pas une forme d'impérialisme épistémologique?
~ Judith Butler
The] association of wealth with whites and poverty with blacks is not accidental. It is the nature of the imperialist relationship that enriches the metropolis at the expense of the colony i.e. it makes the whites richer and the blacks poorer.
~ Walter Rodney
There is the mistaken belief that black people achieved power with independence (e.g., Malaya, Jamaica, Kenya), but a black man ruling a dependent state within the imperialist system has now power. He is simply an agent of the whites in the metropolis, with an army and a police force designed to maintain the imperialist way of things in that particular colonial area.
~ Walter Rodney
Only recently has tolerance become an emblem of Western civilization, an emblem that identifies the West exclusively with modernity, and with liberal democracy in particular, while also disavowing the West's savagely intolerant history, which includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch burnings, centuries of anti-Semitism, slavery, lynching, genocidal and other violent practices of imperialism and colonialism, Naziism, and brutal responses to decolonization.
~ Wendy Brown
Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of world economy, is so far advanced that racial purity can have meaning only to a numbskull.
~ Wilhelm Reich
The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'.
~ James C. Scott
modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a "civilizing mission.
~ James C. Scott
I hated to have us take the Philippines, but I don't see how in the world we can give them up.
~ Doris Kearns Goodwin
Où veux-je en venir ? A cette idée : que nul ne colonise innocemment, que nul non plus ne colonise impunément ; qu'une nation qui colonise, qu'une civilisation qui justifie la colonisation - donc la force - est une civilisation malade, une civilisation moralement atteinte, qui, irrésistiblement, de conséquence à conséquence, de reniement en reniement, appelle son Hitler, je veux dire son châtiment.
~ Aimé Césaire
Lors donc que Rome, dans cette prétendue marche triomphale vers la civilisation unique, eut détruit, l'une après l'autre, Carthage, l'Egypte, la Grèce, la Judée, la Perse, la Dacie, les Gaules, il arriva qu'elle avait dévoré elle-même les digues qui la protégeaient contre l'océan humain sous lequel elle devait périr.
~ Aimé Césaire
Ce qu'il ne pardonne pas à Hitler, ce n'est pas le crime en soi, le crime contre l'homme, ce n'est pas l'humiliation de l'homme en soi, c'est le crime contre l'homme blanc, c'est l'humiliation de l'homme blanc, et d'avoir appliqué à l'Europe des procédés colonialistes dont ne relevaient jusqu'ici que les Arabes d'Algérie, les coolies de l'Inde et les nègres d'Afrique.
~ Aimé Césaire
Part of what is wrong with the view of American imperialism is that it is antithetical to our interests. We are better off when people are governing themselves. I'm sure there is some guy that will tell you that philosophy is no different from the Roman Empire's. Well, it is fundamentally different.
~ Paul Wolfowitz
The most important thing in our war preparations is to teach all our people to hate U.S. imperialism. Otherwise, we will not be able to defeat the U.S. imperialists who boast of their technological superiority.
~ Kim Il-sung
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few - the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
~ Smedley Butler
In most of the European countries - France stands out in its resistance to this particular form of American cultural imperialism - the national film industries were forced onto the defensive after the war by such binding agreements.
~ Fredric Jameson
The only reason an empire ever fights wars is to maintain empire.
~ Abby Martin
In the present imperialistic milieu there can be no wars of national self-defense.
~ Karl Liebknecht
If you look back historically, admittedly a long time ago, there were three Afghan wars in which Britain didn't even come a good second. In more recent years the Russians were there with 120,000 men for ten years.
~ John Major
Daily Tribune, 5 August 1853: England has to fulfil a double mission in India, one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.
~ Rajmohan Gandhi
Umar Hayat's father, Malik Tiwana, provided soldiers to the British for the recapture of Delhi and for combat against the Rani of Jhansi.
~ Rajmohan Gandhi
Dalhousie proved staunch in his imperialist and modernizing convictions and resolute in his conclusion, quickly formed, of Indian inferiority.
~ Rajmohan Gandhi
Sikh and Muslim Punjabis, Pashtuns and Gurkhas joined the British in the slaughter
~ Rajmohan Gandhi