IMPERIALISM QUOTES
quotations about imperialism
Ultimately, empires are only possible because of the weakness of others; and as that balance of power shifts over time, empires that once looked impregnable find that their only way forward from the peak of their power is actually down.
D. COATES
America in the Shadow of Empires
Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.
EDWARD W. SAID
Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2003
Empires always develop mission statements. The Romans said they brought order and justice to the conquered, the Spanish brought the word of God, the British free trade and prosperity, the French la mission civilisatrice, the Americans democracy and free enterprise.... Mission statements typically strengthen after expansion has begun, for they offer more elevated motives than mere profit and insecurity; they deflect attention from the militarism of the project, and they are useful in giving a sense of moral uplift to the imperialists themselves.
MICHAEL MANN
The Sources of Social Power
Triumphant peoples, successful peoples, possessing peoples--empires!--do not want crucified criminals as their chief cultic symbol, especially not when they themselves are the crucifiers ... as they regularly are!
DOUGLAS JOHN HALL
"Where in the World Are We", Princeton Lectures on Youth, Church, and Culture
Empires are always dying.
STEWART BRAND
The Clock of the Long Now
Amid the welter of vague political abstractions ... where meanings shift so quickly and so subtly, not only following changes of thought, but often manipulated artificially by political practitioners so as to obscure, expand, or distort ... a certain broad consistency in its relations to other kindred terms is the nearest approach to definition which such a term as Imperialism admits. Nationalism, internationalism, colonialism, its three closest congeners, are equally elusive, equally shifty, and the changeful overlapping of all four demands the closest vigilance.
J. ALLAN HOBSON
Imperialism
I came, I saw, I conquered.
JULIUS CAESAR
attributed, Plutarch's Lives
There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die. That time is already here.
KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Of Fire and Night
Within its history, Anglo-American imperialism has alienated the world outside the West in the form of the other, so that it could dream the other's redemption in the form of the self.
ERIC CHEYFITZ
The Poetics of Imperialism
Radio ... is now the chief agent of imperialism. It does not purify the spirit of man, does not, like the book, bring him back to the sanctuary of solitude, but throws him to the lions, subtly preparing his mind for the blood and chains of public sacrifice.
GEORGES DUHAMEL
In Defense of Letters
I was a slave, but never a fool. This empire is vast beyond imagining and we have killed only a fraction of the force they will bring against us. They will kill us, all of us, for we are slaves and we cannot be allowed even the barest hope of freedom. Without us, they have no empire.
ANTHONY RYAN
Queen of Fire
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness -- and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe.
ARUNDHATI ROY
War Talk
Imperialists never can believe that "their" subject peoples "really" want to repudiate them. If they show that they do so, they must have been "misled by agitators", "corrupted by the subversive agents of hostile powers", or, as the Russians out it, suborned by "Fascists, Americans, Horthvists, Pilsudskyists, imperialists, etc., etc., etc." They must be protected from themselves, imperialists always conclude, and at all costs prevented from deciding their own futures.
UNKNOWN
Imprint, 1961
A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.
GEORGE ORWELL
Burmese Days
The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies--which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest--well-nigh impossible. In fact, its logical consequence is the destruction of all living communities, those of the conquered peoples as well as of the people at home.
HANNAH ARENDT
Imperialism: Part Two of the Origins of Totalitarianism
America's entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as a shock to Americans, who don't like to think of their country as an empire. But what else can you call America's legions of soldiers, spooks and special forces straddling the globe?
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
New York Times, July 28, 2002
The builders of empires always justified their actions by their beliefs that they and their cultures were superior to the cultures of those they conquered. The English imperialists, like the Romans, the Portuguese and the Spanish before them, believed in their superiority and strength, and that their actions were instruments of the divine order. In the British Empire God was indeed an Englishman.
ADAM JAMROZIK
The Chains of Colonial Inheritance
Imperialism [is] more often the name of the emotion that reacts to a series of events than a definition of the events themselves. Where Colonization finds analysts and analogies, imperialism must contend with crusaders for and against.
ARCHIBALD P. THORNTON
Doctrines of Imperialism
Only he who has no use for the empire is fit to be entrusted with it.
ZHUANGZI
The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capitalism is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism