Quotes About Ethnocentrism

O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

I value the blood of one Christian more than that of a hundred Indians.

Why is it that every nation considers its own customs reasonable, and those of other nations amusing?

If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.

The African tribesman, with his complete contempt for truth and his emphasis on brutality and savagery for others but not for himself, is a no-civilization.

I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.

Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.

Do not equate nationalism with patriotism... Nationalism is the first step on the road to Fascism.

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.

Contaban los españoles que muchos indios practicaban la sodomía, que en España se paga con la muerte, aunque los incas la habían prohibido. Buena prueba de la lujuria de esa gente eran las cerámicas eróticas que los aventureros mostraban en las tabernas para regocijo de los parroquianos, quienes no sospechaban que se pudiese holgar de tan variadas maneras. Aseguraban que las madres rompían la virginidad de sus hijas con los dedos antes de entregarlas

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas and customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnocentric natives? The

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

prejudice is the energy of ethnocentrism. It lurks there, napping, until ethnocentrism summons it to do its dirty work, justifying the occasional bad things we good people want to do.

We must kill the savage to save the man.

Savages were meant to be subdued and put to work—what good were they otherwise, to themselves or anybody else? When Il Duce's sons dropped mustard gas from airplanes among barefooted black soldiers and thus put them to rout, they were proving themselves superior beings

You must also remember the yellow-hair may give you many more children than a Comanche woman. Take care or you could father more children than you can feed. I've never seen a white woman yet who wasn't a good breeder." A slow grin spread across Hunter's mouth. "You will tell her this, yes? So far she isn't showing the proper enthusiasm.

Burton and his ilk also had a distinctive philosophy: they believed that science showed that Europeans and Americans were biologically, mentally, and socially superior to others. "The savage is morally and mentally an unfit instrument for the spread of civilization except when, like the higher mammalia, he is reduced to a state of slavery," wrote August Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers,

Take up the White Man's burden -- send forth the best ye breed -- go, bind your sons to exile to serve your captives need.

And Americans always think international laws are for other people anyway

An Attack on the fundamental democratic foundation-Modern European white industry does not even theoretically seek the good of all but simply of all Europeans.

European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human.

Indian history is the antidote to the pious ethnocentrism of American exceptionalism, the notion that European Americans are God's chosen people. Indian history reveals that the United States and its predecessor British colonies have wrought great harm in the world. We must not forget this—not to wallow in our wrongdoing, but to understand and to learn, that we might not wreak harm again.

There is no gene for genocide. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and our desire for social dominance are tendencies, not triggers that lead to mechanical causation or reflex action.