Best 174 quotes in «imperialism quotes» category

We ought not to speak only about the economics of globalization, but about the psychology of globalization. It's like the psychology of a battered woman being faced with her husband again and being asked to trust him again. That's what is happening. We are being asked by the countries that invented nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and apartheid and modern slavery and racism - countries that have perfected the gentle art of genocide, that colonized other people for centuries - to trust them when they say that they believe in a level playing field and the equitable distribution of resources and in a better world. It seems comical that we should even consider that they really mean what they say.

What I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. (For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal's deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal's point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted one me.

Western governments invaded Iraq, dismantled Libya, interfered without success in Yemen and Syria. Yet North Korea causes all the trouble?

What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and the emergence of "superfluous" money, the result of oversaving, which could no longer find productive investment within national borders. For the first time, investment of power did not pave the way for investment of money, since uncontrollable investments in distant countries threatened to transform large strata of society into gamblers, to change the whole capitalist economy from a system of production to a system of financial speculation, and to replace the profits of production with profits in commissions. The decade immediately before the imperialist era, the seventies of the last century, witnessed an unparalleled increase in swindles, financial scandals, and gambling in the stock market.

You know and we know, as practical men that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength and that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

When the British Empire turned their back on millions of Irish dying during the Great Famine, Muslim nations sent food relief.

You are wrong,” says the man. His voice is low and resonant. The metal walls of the dome, all the knives and swords and spears, all seem to vibrate with each of his words. “Your rulers and their propaganda have sold you this watered-down conceit of war, of a warrior yoked to the whims of civilization. Yet for all their self-professed civility, your rulers will gladly spend a soldier’s life to better aid their posturing, to keep the cost of a crude good low. They will send the children of others off to die and only think upon it later to grandly and loudly memorialize them, lauding their great sacrifice. Civilization is but the adoption of this cowardly method of murder.

Wherever autocratic power vanished at an early date—as in the Netherlands and later in England—and the protective interest receded into the background, they swiftly discovered that trade must be free—“free to the nethermost recesses of hell.

Yet I now ask of you—are you marauders or are you servants? Do you give power to others, or do you hoard it? Do you fight not to have something, but rather fight so that others might one day have something? Is your blade a part of your soul, or is it a burden, a tool, to be used with care? Are you soldiers, my children, or are you savages?

Chinese people are thoroughly sick of Western imperialism.

Building democracy as an imposition from abroad is a form of imperialism.

Everything is divisible. And so is this colossus of U.S. imperialism. It can be split up and defeated.

Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.

Imperialism, in a sense, is the transition stage from capitalism to Socialism. . . . It is capitalism dying, not dead.

I don't know that I would need to be famous as a Middle East policy expert to see that unilateral imperialism is bad policy.

Imperialism is not the creation of any one or any one group of states.

For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.

Give me the centralism of liberty; give me the imperialism of equal rights.

... If Mr. Kennedy does not like Socialism, we do not like imperialism. We do not like Capitalism.

Imperialism is a paper tiger.

Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.

Mr. President, call the toady of American imperialism to order.

In the common esteem, not only are the only good aboriginals dead ones, but all aboriginals are either sacred or contemptible according to the length of time they have been dead.

Monotheism is but imperialism in religion.

Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution.

Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.

The grand destroyer of the world, and the greatest threat... is represented by U.S. imperialism.

Peoples of the Americas are rising once again, saying no to imperialism, saying no to fascism, saying no to intervention - and saying no to death.

Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world.

The only grandeur of imperialism lies in the nation's losing battle against it.

There is no connection between imperialism and democracy. I mean when we ran an Empire which we did when I was born, there was no democracy anywhere.

The truth is that neither British nor American imperialism was or is idealistic. It has always been driven by economic or strategic interests.

We are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults at it.

Ultimately, imperialism made even the British working classes suffer. This is a point which the British working classes found quite difficult to swallow, but they did, actually.

Violent nationalism, otherwise known as imperialism, is a curse.

We are not anti-American. We do not dislike Americans though we abhor American imperialism in all its manifestations. But then, so do many Americans. Many of them have said that even more forthrightly than we have, and many of them have suffered more than any of us for their plain speaking.

A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape—Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this—the section 'At the Hospital' has the term solsaga ('I have loose bowels'), and the section 'Our Foreign Friends Say' contains the Korean for 'President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.' I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida ('We have a bumper harvest every year').

After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.

What we have is a more sophisticated form of imperialism, which is economic. But lurking in the background, always ready to go, is an armed force.

When imperialism feels weak, it resorts to brute force.

While envisaging the destruction of imperialism, it is necessary to identify its head, which is no other than the United States of America.

A circular letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to all German authorities abroad shortly after the November pogroms of 1918 stated: "The emigration movement of only about 100,000 Jews has already sufficed to awaken the interest of many countries to the Jewish danger.... Germany is very interested in maintaining the dispersal of Jewry... the influx of Jews in all parts of the world invokes the opposition of the native population and thereby forms the best propaganda for the German Jewish policy.... The poorer and therefore more burdensome the immigrating Jews is to the country absorbing him, the stronger the country will react.

A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

Afghanistan—where empires go to die.

Als it is hard for America to fight wars in the name of freedom, if those people themselves choose for nonfreedom. Can America and England save India from communism, if they vote communist themselves.

American consumers and investors could acquire foreign goods and companies without their government having to worry that the dollars used in their purchases would be presented for conversion into gold. Instead those dollars were hoarded by central banks, for which they were the only significant source of additional international reserves. America was able to run a balance-of-payments deficit “without tears,” in the words of the French economist Jacques Rueff. This ability to purchase foreign goods and companies using resources conjured out of thin air was the exorbitant privilege of which French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing so vociferously complained.

Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution, itself inspired by the French Revolution. The French regime could not allow its lucrative Santo Domingo to go free, and would not allow the Haitian people to live within the realm of the Enlightenment's " Rights of Man." The Haitians nonetheless triumphed, and Haiti became the first modern colony to win its independence. The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home emptyhanded. As a sleight of hand, the French government tried to maintain sovereignty over its colonies by repackaging them as " overseas territories." A people hungry for liberation did not want such measly hors d'oeuvres.

And what the white students had not expected to let themselves in for, when boarding the Freedom Train, was the realisation that the black situation in America was but one aspect of the fraudulent nature of American life. They had not expected to be forced to judge their parents, their elders, and their antecedents, so harshly, and they had not realised how cheaply, after all, the rulers of the republic held their white lives to be. Coming to the defence of the rejected and the destitute, they were confronted with the extent of their own alienation, and the unimaginable dimensions of their own poverty. They were privileged and secure only so long as they did, in effect, what they were told: but they had been raised to believe that they were free.

And Latin America has become very fashionable, yet what repels me is that everyone in Europe goes and imposes themselves there under this mantle of social and socialist cooperation, which in reality is nothing but a disgusting subspecies of European Christian-Socialist fussiness.The Europeans bore themselves to death and meddle every where in the so called Third World in order to escape that fatal European boredom. Missionarianism is a German vice which has invariably just brought misfortune to the world today, which has invariably just plunged the world into crisis The Church has only poisoned Africa with its detestable dear God, and now it is poisoning Latin America with it. The Catholic Church is the world poisoner the world destroyer, the world annihilator, that is the truth. The Germans continually poison the world outside of their borders and they will give it no rest until this entire world is fatally poisoned. So I have long withdrawn from my bad habit of wanting to help people in Africa and South America and into myself entirely. There is no helping humanity in our world which has been a hypocrisy for centuries. And, like humanity, there is no helping the World because both are a hypocrisy through and through. (Goethe Dies, p. 73)

Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR's thinking, "he is our bloody tyrant." In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the west.