Quotes About Colonialism

We must kill the savage to save the man.

When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.

there was nothing you couldn't accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years.

there was something willfully idiotic in going to an unknown country, ignoring its people, their languages, art, its beasts and butterflies, flowers, herbs, trees, ruins, et cetera, and reducing it all to a few lumps of heavy matter un the center of a dish.

She had no time for woke Westerners who wanted to decolonize everything.

What Waringa tried hard to avoid was looking at the pictures of the walls and windows of the church. Many of the pictures showed Jesus in the arms of the virgin Mary or on the cross. But others depicted the devil, with two cow-like horns and a tail like a monkey's, raising one leg in a dance of evil, while his angels, armed with burning pitchforks, turned over human beings on a bonfire. The Virgin Mary, Jesus and God's angels were white, like European, but the devil and his angels were black.

Our fathers fought bravely. But do you know the biggest weapon unleashed by the enemy against them? It was not the Maxim gun. It was division among them. Why? Because a people united in faith are stronger than the bomb

He carried the Bible; the soldier carried the gun; the administrator and the settler carried the coin. Christianity, Commerce, Civilization: the Bible, the Coin, the Gun: Holy Trinity.

Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world.

Despite Lawrence's wartime promises to the Arabs, it was agreed to give Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine the status of British 'mandates' – the euphemism for colonies – while the French got Syria and the Lebanon.* The former German colonies of Togoland, Cameroon and East Africa were added to the British possessions

En 1863, en Newcastle, el doctor James Hunt había dejado consternada a la audiencia de una reunión de la British Association for the Advancement of Science, al afirmar que los «negros» eran una especie separada de seres humanos, a medio camino entre el mono y el «hombre europeo».

In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?

Between a half and two-thirds of all Europeans who migrated to North America between 1650 and 1780 did so under contracts of indentured servitude;

Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression Fuck off.'   

The facile, if not tautological, answer to the question is that the West dominated the Rest because of imperialism.

The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few.

autocríticos y demasiado blandos hacia los pueblos que habían subyugado: Hay ingleses que se reprochan haber gobernado mal el país. ¿Por qué? Porque los indios no muestran entusiasmo por su dominio. Afirmo que los ingleses han gobernado la India muy bien, pero que su error ha sido esperar entusiasmo del pueblo que gobiernan.

If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people,' he had reminded his Cabinet colleagues in 1878, 'the British Empire would not have been made.

El famoso lema de Samuel Adams: «No taxation without representation» («No a los impuestos sin representación») no era un rechazo a lo británico, sino su afirmación enfática. Lo que los colonos decían estar haciendo era exigir la misma libertad disfrutada por los súbditos británicos al otro lado del Atlántico.

Though we hear much less about it, India had made a bigger contribution to the imperial war than Australia in terms of both finance and manpower.

The British Empire was the nearest thing there has ever been to a world government. Yet its mode of operation was a triumph of minimalism.

I think I was eight the first time I saw the Benin bronzes. I was taken to see them at the British Museum by my white, British mother, who felt it important that her half-Nigerian children learned about the artistic achievements of their forefathers. I've been entranced by them ever since.

You can do business with America or the authoritarian dictators of Beijing, who oppress their own people, put millions of Muslims in concentration camps, and are rolling out a new and insidious colonialism around the world with their rapacious belt and road infrastructure program. Which side are you on, Britain? Canada? The EU? You choose.

For many people, Timbuktu has long represented the essence of remoteness: a mythical, faraway place located on the boundaries of our collective consciousness. But like many of the myths associated with colonialism, the reality is very different.