Imperialism Quotes

1. "To those who fought World War II, it was plain enough that Allied bombs were killing huge numbers of German civilians, that Churchill was fighting to preserve imperialism as well as democracy, and that the bulk of the dying in Europe was being done by the Red Army at the service of Stalin. It is only in retrospect that we begin to simplify experience into myth — because we need stories to live by, because we want to honor our ancestors and our country instead of doubting them. In this way, a necessary but terrible war is simplified into a "good war," and we start to feel shy or guilty at any reminder of the moral compromises and outright betrayals that are inseparable from every combat. The best history writing reverses this process, restoring complexity to our sense of the past."
Author: Adam Kirsch

2. "As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism."
Author: Angela Davis

3. "Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?"
Author: Arundhati Roy

4. "When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it's not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. It's not about the burqa. It's about the coercion. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their problems."
Author: Arundhati Roy

5. "Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of these things did not come out of Islam. Islam is not that developed."
Author: Azar Nafisi

6. "Politically progressive black people on the Left who are not nationalist, like myself, share a perspective that promotes the eradication of white supremacy, the de-centering of the West, redressing of biases, and commitment to affirming black self-determination. Yet we add to the critique of white Western imperialism a repudiation of patriarchy, a critique of capitalism, and a concern for interracial coalition building."
Author: Bell Hooks

7. "Feminist consciousness-raising has not significantly pushed women in the direction of revolutionary politics. For the most part, it has not helped women understand capitalism–how it works as a system that exploits female labor and its interconnections with sexist oppression. It has not urged women to learn about different political systems like socialism or encouraged women to invent and envision new political systems. It has not attacked materialism and our society's addiction to overconsumption. It has not shown women how we benefit from the exploitation and oppression of women and men globally or shown us ways to oppose imperialism. Most importantly, it has not continually confronted women with the understanding that feminist movement to end sexist oppression can be successful only if we are committed to revolution, to the establishment of a new social order."
Author: Bell Hooks

8. "We keep coming back to the question of representation because identity is always about representation. People forget that when they wanted white women to get into the workforce because of the world war, what did they start doing? They started having a lot of commercials, a lot of movies, a lot of things that were redoing the female image, saying, "Hey, you can work for the war, but you can still be feminine." So what we see is that the mass media, film, TV, all of these things, are powerful vehicles for maintaining the kinds of systems of domination we live under, imperialism, racism, sexism etc. Often there's a denial of this and art is presented as politically neutral, as though it is not shaped by a reality of domination."
Author: Bell Hooks

9. "Imperialism or globalization - I don't have to care what it's called to hate it."
Author: Bill Ayers

10. "Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation."
Author: C. L. R. James

11. "Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism."
Author: Carlos Fuentes

12. "In a policy shift which the historian Guy de la Bedoyere has compared with Western Imperialism, the Romans converted militant Britons to their way of life with consumer entincements, introducing them to the urbane pleasures of hot spas and fine dining, encouraging them to wear togas and speak Latin."
Author: Catharine Arnold

13. "China has no desire to replace Western imperialism in Asia with an Oriental imperialism or isolationism of its own or anyone else."
Author: Chiang Kai Shek

14. "A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flown on another orb! Also, English becomes the first and only language spoken on a neighboring rock! Who could forbear to cheer? Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism?"
Author: Christopher Hitchens

15. "[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

16. "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')."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

17. "The most disastrous phenomenon of the current situation is the factor that imperialism is employing for its own ends all the powers of the proletariat, all of its institutions and weapons, which its fighting vanguard has created for its war of liberation."
Author: Clara Zetkin

18. "The people of Nicaragua were suffering oppression. This made us develop an awareness which eventually led us to commit ourselves to the struggle against the domination of the capitalists of our country in collusion with the U.S. government, i.e. imperialism."
Author: Daniel Ortega

19. "Consider that in 1800 Western powers claimed 55 percent but actually held approximately 35 percent of the earth's surface, and that by 1874 the proportion was 67 percent, a rate of increase of 83,000 square miles per year. By 1914, the annual rate had risen to an astonishing 240,000 square miles [per year], and Europe held a grand total of roughly 85 percent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths. No other associated set of colonies in history was as large, none so totally dominated, none so unequal in power to the Western metropolis." Culture and Imperialism, pg. 8"
Author: Edward W. Said

20. "Liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentred, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose conciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can see 'the complete consort dancing together' contrapuntally."
Author: Edward W. Said

21. "The constancies and equivalences adumbrated work havoc with such settled topical blocks as myth and philosophy, natural reason and revelation, philosophy and religion, or the Orient with its cyclical time and Christianity with its linear history. And what is modem about the modem mind, one may ask, if Hegel, Comte, or Marx, in order to create an image of history that will support their ideological imperialism, still use the same techniques for distorting the reality of history as their Sumerian predecessors?"
Author: Eric Voegelin

22. "Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well."
Author: Frantz Fanon

23. "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."
Author: Fredric Jameson

24. "In most of the European countries - France stands out in its resistance to this particular form of American cultural imperialism - the national film industries were forced onto the defensive after the war by such binding agreements."
Author: Fredric Jameson

25. "Personally, I regard myself as an intellectual 'rebel,' kicking against the 'old colonialism-imperialism paradigm' which has landed Africa in a conundrum."
Author: George Ayittey

26. "So long as there is imperialism in the world, a permanent peace is impossible."
Author: Hassan Nasrallah

27. "To a Soviet person, used to the nationality policy of the USSR, all the mistakes of the American government's Indian policy are evident from the first glance. The mistakes are, of course, intentional. The fact of the matter is that in Indian schools, class is conducted exclusively in English. There is no written form of any Indian language at all. It's true that every Indian tribe has its own language, but this doesn't change anything. If there were any desire to do so, the many American specialists who have fallen in love with Indian culture could create Indian written languages in a short time. But imperialism remains imperialism."
Author: Ilya Ilf

28. "For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual."
Author: Irving Babbitt

29. "Democracy is now going forth on a crusade against imperialism."
Author: Irving Babbitt

30. "Imperialism was genuinely popular among Athenians who would expect to share in its profits, even if only indirectly and collectively, and not to have to bear its burdens."
Author: J. M. Roberts

31. "Imperialism creates the illusion of wealth as far as the masses are concerned. It usually serves to hide the fact that the ruling classes are gobbling up the natural resources of the home territory in an improvident manner and are otherwise utilizing the national wealth largely for their own purposes. Eventually the general public is called upon to pay for all of this, frequently after the military machine can no longer maintain external aggression."
Author: Jack D. Forbes

32. "Monotheism is but imperialism in religion."
Author: James Henry Breasted

33. "Like a cyclone, imperialism spins across the globe; militarism crushes peoples and sucks their blood like a vampire."
Author: Karl Liebknecht

34. "It is wrong to try to avoid the struggle against imperialism under the pretext that independence and revolution are important, but that peace is still more precious."
Author: Kim Il Sung

35. "We are opposed to the line of compromise with imperialism. At the same time, we cannot tolerate the practice of only shouting against imperialism, but, in actual fact, being afraid to fight it."
Author: Kim Il Sung

36. "That's what imperialism is all about, shoving your language, religion, culture, and race down others' throats and telling them that they're beneath you – and it's not unique to the West either."
Author: M.B. Dallocchio

37. "Western interests: imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, racism, and other negative -isms."
Author: Malcolm X

38. "You can cuss out colonialism, imperialism, and all other kinds of ism, but it's hard for you to cuss that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, your soul goes."
Author: Malcolm X

39. "It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities."
Author: Michael Moorcock

40. "[Huxley's Perennial Philosophy is concerned with] the need to love the earth and respect nature instead of following the example of those who 'chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines, and organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist, and nationalist propaganda.' He attacked 'technological imperialism' and the mechanisation [sic] which was 'increasing the power of a minority to exercise a co-ersive control over the lives of their fellows' and 'the popular philosophy of life... now moulded by advertising copy whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extroverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell."
Author: Nicholas Murray

41. "I do not hesitate one second to state clearly and unmistakably: I belong to the American resistance movement which fights against American imperialism, just as the resistance movement fought against Hitler."
Author: Paul Robeson

42. "The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top"
Author: Sarah Vowell

43. "What is wrong with the Iranians in addition to the nuclear bomb? This is the only country on Earth in the 21st century that has renewed imperialistic ambitions. They really want to become the hegemon of the Middle East in an age that gave up imperialism."
Author: Shimon Peres

44. "The moment we think in the terms of 'Yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but we should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism', the ethical catastrophe is already here: the only appropriate stance is unconditional solidarity with all victims."
Author: Slavoj Žižek

45. "Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain."
Author: Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

46. "Imperialism: The final stage of Capitalism."
Author: Vladimir Lenin

47. "According to a group of New England college students, writing in the year 1920, an alien was the following:"A person hostile to his country.""A person against the government." "A person who is on the opposite side.""A native of an unfriendly country.""A foreigner at war.""A foreigner who tries to do harm to the country he is in.""An enemy from a foreign land.""A person against a country." etc. . . .Yet the word alien is an unusually exact legal term, far more exact than words like sovereignty, independence, national honor, rights, defense, aggression, imperialism, capitalism, socialism, about which we readily take sides "for" or "against."
Author: Walter Lippmann

48. "A true world outlook is incompatible with a foreign imperialism, no matter how high-minded the governing country."
Author: Wendell Willkie

49. "It has been a long while since the United States had any imperialistic designs toward the outside world. But we have practised within our own boundaries something that amounts to race imperialism."
Author: Wendell Willkie

50. "Neo-Spenglerians who are attuned to the racial view of history (call them "racists" for convenience) hold that the "final" phase of a Culture—the imperialistic stage—is final only because the cultural organism destroys its body and kills its soul by this process. Obviously, if we are to draw analogies between cultures and organisms we must agree that the soul of the organism dies only because of the death of the body. The soul can sicken—the soul of the West is now diseased and perhaps mortally ill—but it cannot die unless the organism itself dies. And this, point out the racists, is precisely what has happened to all previous cultures; death of the organism being the natural result of the suicidal process of imperialism."
Author: Willis Carto

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