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Quotes About Imperialism

the Anti-Imperialist League...carried on a long campaign to educate the American public about the horrors of the Philippine war and the evils of imperialism. It was...united in a common moral outrage at what was being done to the Filipinos in the name of freedom. Whatever their differences on other matters, they would all agree with William James's angry statement: 'God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles'.
~ Howard Zinn
Thank God I'm blind, since I can't see the crimes Britain is committing against my people.
~ Ibrahim Nasrallah
The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
~ Smedley Butler
From the 1920s into the 1940s, Britain's standard of living was supported by oil from Iran. British cars, trucks, and buses ran on cheap Iranian oil. Factories throughout Britain were fueled by oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which projected British power all over the world, powered its ships with Iranian oil.
~ Stephen Kinzer
The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913 - the first episode of globalization - was made possible, in large part, by military might rather than market forces.
~ Ha-Joon Chang
Though he'd never seen her, just her name on the hot, dry wind was enough to give him the shakes. Mage killer, the scorpion in the Imperial pocket.
~ Steven Erikson
Joffe], during a visit to Russia, complained to his KGB handler about the awful coffee. The KGB dude replied that it was really the Kremlin's answer to America's neutron bomb -- both killed people but left the building intact. "I was then that I first saw this vision,"said Joffe. Bad coffee equals expansionism, imperialism, and war; good coffee drips with civility and pacifism and lassitude...
~ Stewart Lee Allen
British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.
~ Salman Rushdie
Germany belonged, with Italy, to the so-called verspätete Nationen (late-coming nations), which sought to compensate for their delayed arrival in the game of imperialism.
~ Misha Glenny
The Christian Church,' he went on, 'tries to pretend it doesn't exist. But other religions aren't so coy – the ancient religions, I mean, the ones born out of passion and intelligence, an understanding of the earth and the way the seasons move, not the ones spread and imposed through politics and imperialism.
~ Mo Hayder
Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world.
~ Molly Ivins
Who can doubt that there is an American empire?—an "informal" empire, not colonial in polity, but still richly equipped with imperial paraphernalia: troops, ships, planes, bases, proconsuls, local collaborators, all spread around the luckless planet. —Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Cycles of American History (1984)
~ Morris Berman
From the book he carefully tears out several maps, and in this light Afghanistan's mountains and hills and restlessly branching corridors of rock appear as though the pages are crumpled up, and there is a momentary wish in him to smooth them down. Laser-guided bombs are falling onto the pages in his hands, missiles summoned from the Arabian Sea, from American warships that are as long as the Empire State Building is tall.
~ Nadeem Aslam
Jugée petite-bourgeoise par les gauches, la cause des femmes est aussi présentée comme le cheval de Troie de l'impérialisme ; et dans le meilleur des cas, comme soluble dans la libération de la nation.
~ Nadia Tazi
imperialism has always been something of a losing proposition, especially in the modern international system, and our ruling class's attempt to nation-build the world in their own image is doomed to failure and to creating one disaster after another….
~ Thomas E. Woods Jr.
This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.
~ Thomas Sowell
The ending of the slave trade was one of many European policies imposed upon Africa by the conquerors.
~ Thomas Sowell
Even when the British took part in these wars, they fought on other people's territory or at sea.
~ Thomas Sowell
Contrary to various economic theories of imperialism, Africa was not a major outlet for European investment or exports.
~ Thomas Sowell
The impact of European conquerors on Africa, for good and evil, was relatively brief as history is measured-about three generations, as compared to the centuries in which the Romans ruled Britain or imperial China ruled parts of southeast Asia or the Moors ruled Spain.
~ Thomas Sowell
The world dominance of Great Britain enabled it to impose its anti-slavery edicts on many other sovereign nations.
~ Thomas Sowell
Contrary to many theories of imperialism, this greatest of all empires did not revolve around an export of capital to the Third World.
~ Thomas Sowell
England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales might have been partners in an imperial project that required the projection of 'English Literature' as one of the defining elements of cultural superiority that justified the continuous extension of Empire throughout the nineteenth century, but they were also engaged in an internal struggle over the origins and the dynamics of that literature, and about the role of their national literatures within the consolidating discipline of English.
~ Cairns Craig
Ethiopia doesn't matter to the West," I say, stating the obvious. "We offer them nothing they can exploit.
~ Camilla Gibb