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Quotes About Imperialism

In other words, imperialism was instrumental not only in making the revolution a practical inevitability, but also in creating favourable conditions for a direct assault on the citadels of capitalism.
~ Joseph Stalin
As Americans gained a new belief in their manifest destiny around the globe, Hawaiians lost their country, the first sovereign nation to become a casualty of America's imperial outreach.
~ Julia Flynn Siler
There's much about the British Raj which I think is disreputable. It was rapacious; it was a sort of kleptocracy, and it was also racist. Indians were not treated as equals.
~ Michael Portillo
In a much larger sense, the problem of Sabah is directly influenced by the duplicity of imperial Britain. For whatever devious reason, the dismantling of the British empire created divisions and violence due to ethnic and religious differences.
~ F. Sionil Jose
I think no one knows what humanitarian intervention means. If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.
~ Stanley Hauerwas
Para de fato compreender a violência contra a mulher, precisamos observar as interseções de classe, desastres ambientais, gênero, imperialismo, militarismo, patriarcado, pobreza, racismo e guerra.
~ Eve Ensler
British rule meant not democracy -colonialism is almost by definition underdemocratic - but limited constitutional liberalism and capitalism
~ Fareed Zakaria
U.S. imperialism's avowed policy of sending soldiers to fight the revolutionary movement in any Latin American country, to kill workers, students, peasants, to kill Latin American men and women, has no other purpose than to maintain its monopolistic interests and the privileges of the treacherous oligarchies which support the monopolies.
~ Fidel Castro
The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from 'heart of Empire' to 'occupied colony'. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history.
~ Fintan O'Toole
The] crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from the 'heart of empire' to 'occupied colony'. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized. The dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony.
~ Fintan O'Toole
How hollow would the charges of American imperialism be when these failed countries are and are seen to be transformed from states of terror to nations of prosperity, from governments of dictatorship to examples of democracy, from sources of instability to beacons of calm.
~ blair tony iii
At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
~ Salman Rushdie
The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives.
~ Henry A. Wallace
The tradition has always been that in Roman films, the Romans are always British, and it's usually posh British: Laurence Olivier and his ilk. My take on all this was that it's a metaphor for empire and the end of empire.
~ Kevin Macdonald
Growing up in the Libya of the 1970s, I remember the prevalence of local bands who were as much influenced by Arabic musical traditions as by the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. But the project of 'Arabisation' soon got to them, too, and western musical instruments were declared forbidden as 'instruments of imperialism.'
~ Hisham Matar
When the white man had warmed himself before the Indians' fire and filled himself with their hominy, he became very large. With a step he bestrode the mountains, and his feet covered the plains and the valleys. His hand grasped the eastern and the western sea, and his head rested on the moon.
~ Speckled Snake
Why do Japanese commandos fire Czech machine guns at Puerto Rican passengers departing an Air France flight in an Israeli airport? To strike at American Imperialism!" p. 155, footnote 13
~ Stathis N. Kalyvas
It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.
~ Michael Moorcock
No system in history has been more relentless [than capitalism] in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.
~ Michael Parenti
In 1965 the Indonesian military—advised, equipped, trained, and financed by the U.S. military and the CIA—overthrew President Achmed Sukarno and eradicated the Indonesian Communist Party and its various allies, killing half a million people (some estimates are as high as a million) in what was the greatest act of political mass murder since the Holocaust.
~ Michael Parenti
Education, once free, is now accessible only to those who can afford the costly tuition rates. The curricula have been "depoliticized," meaning that a left perspective critical of imperialism and capitalism has been replaced by a conservative one that is supportive or at least uncritical of these forces.
~ Michael Parenti
They had not come to India in order to breed and colonize, or even to convert. They were here to plunder, to enrich themselves.
~ Bharati Mukherjee
Since 1945, when Jesus granted America air superiority, we have bombed Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Granada, Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Somalia, Bosnia, The Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen. And Yemen only because the tenth one was free. How did we inherit this moral obligation of bringing justice to the world via death from above? Are we Zeus? It doesn't make any sense. Our schools are crumbling and we wanna teach everyone else a lesson.
~ Bill Maher
Many historians have called this the age of 'merchant' or 'mercantile' capitalism, but 'war capitalism' better expresses its rawness and violence as well as its intimate connection to European imperial expansion. War capitalism, a particularly important but often unrecognized phase in the development of capitalism, unfolded in constantly shifting sets of places embedded within constantly changing relationships. In some parts of the world it lasted into the nineteenth century.
~ Sven Beckert