Quotes about colonialism
page 5

“Till now we Maharashtrians kept saying that Shivaji Utsav is only a historical commemoration and it has no political colour. But the festival that we have organized here in Nashik is both historical and political. Only those people, who have the capability to struggle for the freedom of their country just like Shivaji Maharaj, have the real right to organize and celebrate a festival commemorating his memory. Our main objective must therefore be to strive towards breaking the shackles of colonial rule. If our only aims are finding solace in foreign rule, earning fat salaries, be peaceful negotiators with the government on inconsequential issues such as lowering taxes, diluting some laws here and there, and secure ourselves enough to eat, lead comfortable lives, earn pensions and privileges—then this Utsav is not for you or for Shivaji, but that of the last Peshwa Baji Rao who capitulated to British might! Here we are invoking the god of revolution, Shivaji Maharaj, so that he may inspire and instil that energy in all of us. Depending on circumstances our means might change, but the end is non-negotiable and that end is total and complete freedom for our motherland.”

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) Indian pro-independence activist,lawyer, politician, poet, writer and playwright

From a speech by V. D. Savarkar, quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924 (2019)

God, People, Peace, Law

“It is indeed a great interest, the conservation of your colonies, but even that interest is connected with your constitution; and the supreme interest of the nation and of the colonies themselves is that you conserve your liberty and do not overturn the foundations of that liberty with your own hands. Faugh! Perish your colonies, if you are keeping them at that price. Yes, if you had either to lose your colonies, or to lose your happiness, your glory, your liberty, I would repeat: perish your colonies.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

"On the Condition of Free Men of Colour" (31 May 1791)

Happiness

“Hindu society is guilty of trying to manage its own affairs at its own sacred site, so it deserves to be punished with administrative restrictions on its access to the Rama-Janmabhoomi, and perhaps with further judicial restrictions later. The judges simply confirm what is explicitly laid down in article 30 of the Constitution: minorities enjoy privileges which are denied to Hindus, including the non-interference by the government in the affairs of their places of worship. Hindus have no right to complain when the government takes over Hindu temples, nor when it works hand-in-glove with Islamic activists trying to take over a Hindu sacred site. They should be satisfied with the status of second-class citizens, to which they have been so well accustomed by centuries of colonial rule, Islamic as well as Christian.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple (2002)

“Powerful empires existed and flourished here (in India) while Englishmen were still wandering, painted, in the woods, and while the British Colonies were still a wilderness and a jungle. India has left a deeper mark upon the history, the philosophy, and the religion of mankind, than any other terrestrial unit in the universe.”

George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925) British politician

Lord Curzon, while Viceroy of India, in his address at the Great Delhi Durbar in 1901. Quoted from Stephen Knapp, Mysteries of the Ancient Vedic Empire https://stephenknapp.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/a-look-at-india-from-the-views-of-other-scholars/

Religion, History, Universe, Painting

“I wrote the book just after Zimbabwe’s independence to encourage young Zimbabweans to develop themselves in spite of the challenges they would face doing so. There was also a lot of talk after independence of going back to one’s cultural roots. I wanted to interrogate that idea by examining aspects of the culture we were being told to go back to that affected women in my environment negatively. I was a newly minted feminist at the time and very eager. I also wanted to look at the ongoing effects of colonialism in the new dispensation. At the same time, I hoped to write a book that would be eminently readable, with recognizable characters.”

Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959) Zimbabwean author and filmmaker

On what she had hoped to convey with her first novel Nervous Conditions in “A Crisis of Personhood: Tsitsi Dangarembga by Bhakti Shringarpure” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/tsitsi-dangaremgba/ in BOMB Magazine (2019 Sep 27)

Women, Books, Hope, Idea

“All school-room competition should be abolished. The school should be a family, a fraternity, a colony of cooperating, helping, sympathizing brothers and sisters, not a camp of hot combatants bent on mutual discomfiture. Competition is not necessary, and if it were necessary, it would not be justifiable. If it is not possible to produce great intellects without crimes on character, then let us doze forever in the holy haze of mediocrity. A graceful nature is the most essential psychic possession of a living being.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Individual Culture, p. 264

School, Family, Nature, Sister

“Other people have marveled at the growth and strength of America. They have wondered how a few weak and discordant colonies were able to win their independence from one of the greatest powers of the world. They have been amazed at our genius for self-government. They have been unable to comprehend how the shock of a great Civil War did not destroy our Union. They do not understand the economic progress of our people. It is true that we have had the advantage of great natural resources, but those have not been exclusively ours. Others have been equally fortunate in that direction. The progress of America has been due to the spirit of the people. It is in no small degree due to that spirit that we have been able to produce such great leaders.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

If coming generations are to maintain a like spirit, it will be because they continue to support the principles which these men represented. It is for that purpose that we erect memorials. We can not hold our admiration for the historic figures which we shall see here without growing stronger in our determination to perpetuate the institutions which their lives revealed and established.
1920s, Address at the Black Hills (1927)

War, People, World, Understanding

“With single-minded devotion, the colonial student meanders through the intricacies of the philosophical systems. And yet these systems did aim at providing a philosophical account of the world in the circumstances and conditions of their time. For even philosophical systems are facts of history. By the time, however, that they come to be accepted in the universities for exposition, they have lost the vital power which they had at their first statement, they have shed their dynamism and polemic reference. This is a result of the academic treatment which they are given. The academic treatment is the result of an attitude to philosophical systems as though there was nothing to them but statements standing in logical relation to one another.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Consciencism (1964), Introduction

World, History, Universe, Relation ships

“A colonial student does not by origin belong to the intellectual history in which the university philosophers are such impressive landmarks. The colonial student can be so seduced by these attempts to give a philosophical account of the universe, that surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject. In this way, he omits to draw from his education and from the concern displayed by the great philosophers for human problems, anything which he might relate to the very real problem of colonial domination, which, as it happens, conditions the immediate life of every colonized African.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Consciencism (1964), Introduction

Life, Education, Way, History

“This defective approach to scholarship was suffered by different categories of colonial student. Many of them had been handpicked and, so to say, carried certificates of worthiness with them. These were considered fit to become enlightened servants of the colonial administration. The process by which this category of student became fit usually started at an early age, for not infrequently they had lost contact early in life with their traditional background. By reason of their lack of contact with their own roots, they became prone to accept some theory of universalism, provided it was expressed in vague, mellifluous terms. Armed with their universalism, they carried away from their university courses an attitude entirely at variance with the concrete reality of their people and their struggle.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Consciencism (1964), Introduction

Life, People, Age, Reality

“The destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less that the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country.”

Frantz Fanon book The Wretched of the Earth

Source: The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. 41

World, Country

“The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anti-colonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

Question, Wealth

“Those who believe Europe is for the world have never explained why this process should be one way: why Europeans going anywhere else in the world is colonialism whereas the rest of the world coming to Europe is just and fair.”

Douglas Murray (1979) British political commentator and far-right activist

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017)

World, Way

“This shows that those who attack us are not concerned with the indigenous human being, but with the mineral wealth and biodiversity in these areas. The United Nations has played a key role in overcoming colonialism and cannot accept this mentality to return to these halls and corridors under any pretext.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

Speech at the at the 74th UN General Assembly. Statement by Mr. Jair Messias Bolsonaro, President of the Federative Republic of Brazil http://statements.unmeetings.org/GA74/BR_EN.pdf. United Nations PaperSmart (24 September 2019).

Wealth

“When the people of St-Domingue first tasted the fruit of liberty that they hold from the equity of France; when to the violent upheavals of the revolution that announced it succeeded the pleasures of tranquility; when finally the rule of law took the place of anarchy under which the unfortunate colony had too long suffered, what fatality can have led the greatest enemy of its prosperity and of our happiness still to dare to threaten us with the return of slavery?”

Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803) Leader of the Haitian Revolution

Letter to the French Directory, November 1792

Happiness, People, Pleasure, Law

“For too long, gentlemen by way of abuses that one can never too strongly accuse of having taken pace because of our lack of underrstanding and ignorance - for every long time, I say - we have been victims of your greed and your avarice. Under the blows of your barbarous whip we have accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony; the human race has suffered to asee with what barbarity you have treated men like yourself…”

Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803) Leader of the Haitian Revolution

Letter to the General Assembly (1792)

Men, Way, Suffering, Time

“In my own constituency (where I estimate that about 10 per cent of the population are immigrants from Asia or the Caribbean) I have the impression that, as no doubt elsewhere, the first phase, the sudden impact of Commonwealth immigration, is over. I am going to prophesy, however, that there will be subsequent phases, when the problem will resume its place in public concern and in a more intractable form, when it can no longer be dealt with simply by turning the inlet tap down or off. Long before the coloured population reaches 5 per cent of the total, a proportion will have filtered into the general population, mingled with it in occupation, residence, habits and intermarriage. On the other hand, the rest, numerically perhaps much the greater part, will be in larger or smaller colonies, in certain areas and cities, more separated than now in habits, occupation and way of life. The irregular pattern of population and living which grew up higgledy-piggledy in the early years of immigration will have been tidied up. It is for these colonies, and the problems thereby entailed on our descendants, that they will curse the improvident years, now gone, when we could have avoided it all.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

'Facing Up to Britain's Race Problem', The Daily Telegraph (16 February 1967), quoted in Still to Decide (Elliot Right Way Books, 1972), p. 295
1960s

Life, Way, Problem, Parting

“It would doubtless be best for us to remain permanently on a good footing with England, even, if practicable, to be in alliance with her, but that is quite out of the question so long as this Power only wants to exploit us and in addition has the effrontery to make difficulties for us in our colonial policy everywhere. The astoundingly mean and shameless attacks made against the Kaiser by the English press will, one hopes, never be forgotten.”

Alfred von Waldersee (1832–1904) Prussian Field Marshal

Waldersee in his diary, 12 January 1896

Making love, Hope, Question

“There can be no doubt as to the measureless shamelessness of the English in combating our really modest colonial efforts.”

Alfred von Waldersee (1832–1904) Prussian Field Marshal

Waldersee in his diary, 25 July 1890

Effort

“The part that the woman can play in the development of a revolutionary process is of extraordinary importance. It is well to emphasize this, since in all our countries, with their colonial mentality, there is a certain underestimation of the woman which becomes a real discrimination against her. The woman is capable of performing the most difficult tasks, of fighting beside the men; and despite current belief, she does not create conflicts of a sexual type in the troops.”

Ernesto Che Guevara book Guerrilla Warfare

Source: Guerrilla Warfare (1961), Ch. III: 3. The Role of the Woman

Men, Fight, Parting, Country

“Dharampal, the noted Gandhian, used British data during the colonial period to show that in the ninetheenth century, the shudras comprised a larger student body than any other community did. … Besides the large number of schools at that time, there were also approximately a hundred institutions of higher learning in each district of Bengal and Bihar. Unfortunately, these numbers rapidly dwindled all across India during the nineteenth century under British rule. The British also noted that Sanskrit books were being widely used to teach grammar, lexicology, mathematics, medical science, logic, law and philosophy. …. Furthermore, in the early British period in India, British officials noted that education for the masses was more advanced and widespread in India than it was in England. …. According to Dharampal, the British later replaced this Sanskrit-based system with their own English-based one, the goal being to produce low-level clerks for the British administration.”

Dharampal (1922–2006) Indian historian

Rajiv Malhotra, The Battle for Sanskrit

Books, Education, School, Law

“Slavery in the British colonies of North America was more than a century-and-a-half old before independence. It was roundly condemned, at one time or another, by nearly all the important political personages of the Revolution. I know of no instance in which any of these personages contradicted the doctrine of the Declaration, or maintained that slavery was a positive good. We must recognize, however, that slavery next to the family was perhaps the oldest institution of civilized mankind. Its origin in the ancient world came with the discovery that it was more profitable to enslave an enemy defeated in war than to kill him. The ancient law of the ancient city may be seen in the Bible. When the Israelites conquered Jericho, they put to the sword everyone in the city—men and women, young and old, sheep, oxen, and asses. Only Rahab the harlot and her family were spared, since they had given shelter to the Israelite spies. Later, in the custom of ancient warfare, the males of a defeated people would all be killed, but the women and children would be carried into slavery. Eventually the entire population of a defeated people would be enslaved. Such are the steps in the human story. That defeat in war meant slavery was the rule for many thousands of years.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, God Bless America (2008), Slavery and the Human Story

Women, Men, War, Children

“Also Premchand can not be seen in isolation. He has to be placed in the colonial dispensation (that aimed, besides political subjugation at cultural conquest as part of its imperialist design) was integral in Premchand’s writings. Any viable reaction to this confrontation had to have a differential mix of both the new and the old.”

Premchand (1880–1936) Hindi writer

Above two quotes by Charu Gupta a critique writing in her Essay “Portrayal of Women In Premchand’s stories: A critique”

Parting

“If it was possible for men who exercise their reason, to believe that the divine Author of our existence intended a part of the human race to hold an absolute property in, and an unbounded power over others, marked out by his infinite goodness and wisdom, as the objects of a legal domination never rightfully resistible, however severe and oppressive, the inhabitants of these Colonies might at least require from the Parliament of Great Britain some evidence, that this dreadful authority over them has been granted to that body.”

John Dickinson (1732–1808) American politician

But a reverence for our great Creator, principles of humanity, and the dictates of common sense, must convince all those who reflect upon the subject, that Government was instituted to promote the welfare of mankind, and ought to be administered for the attainment of that end.
Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (6 July 1775)

Wisdom, Men, Exercises, Parting

“Were an impartial and competent observer of the state of society in these middle colonies asked, whence it happens that Virginia and Maryland (which were the first planted, and which are superior to many colonies and inferior to none, in point of natural advantage) are still so exceedingly behind most of the other British trans-Atlantic possessions in all those improvements which bring credit and consequence to a country?”

Jonathan Boucher (1738–1804) English minister

he would answer - They are so, because they are cultivated by slaves. … Some loss and inconvenience would, no doubt, arise from the general abolition of slavery in these colonies: but were it done gradually, with judgement, and with good temper, I have never yet seen it satisfactorily proved that such inconvenience would either be great or lasting. … If ever these colonies, now filled with slaves, be improved to their utmost capacity, an essential part of the improvement must be the abolition of slavery. Such a change would hardly be more to the advantage of the slaves, than it would be to their owners."
"A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution" (London, Robinson, 1797)

Nature, Country

“Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Feeling, Soul, Joy

“What happened India today is probably the only country in the world in which the colonial narrative against it has not been changed.... what happened is that the Marxists perpetuated the negative colonial narrative... so instead of the British being the enemy the Hindus became the enemy....”

David Frawley (1950) American Hindu teacher

David Frawley in Voice of India and the Hindu Renaissance - David Frawley and Shankar Sharan - Indic Talks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeoRA4LxCX8

World, Change, Country

“Replicators are no longer peppered freely through the sea; they are packaged in huge colonies—individual bodies. And phenotypic consequences, instead of being evenly distributed throughout the world, have in many cases congealed into those same bodies. But the individual body, so familiar to us on our planet, did not have to exist. The only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 13. The Long Reach of the Gene

Life, World, Universe, Sea

“Once vigorous measures appear to be the only means left of bringing the Americans to a due submission to the mother country, the colonies will submit.”

George III of the United Kingdom (1738–1820) King of Great Britain and King of Ireland

From George III's letter of February 15, 1775 to Lord North, quoted in the Edinburgh Review (July 1867) from the originals at Windsor. Source: Google Books, The Edinburgh Review volumes 126–126, February 13, 2020 https://books.google.com/books?id=qpiQgE49-P8C&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=Once+vigorous+measures+appear+to+be+the+only+means+left+of+bringing+the+Americans+to+a+due+submission+to+the+mother+country,+the+colonies+will+submit&source=bl&ots=mL-ddKwu1s&sig=ACfU3U1guuvPa24Ta-4K5vWkF6OP4D6HXA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjel-HFgM_nAhUB2FkKHUaSBEkQ6AEwCXoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&f=false,

Appearance, Country

“In place of a slave colony, we want a restored German national state. The state is not an end in itself for us, but rather a means to an end. The true end is the race, the sum of all the living, creative forces of the people. The structure that today calls itself the German republic is not a way to maintain our racial inheritance. It has become an end in itself with no real connection to the people and their needs.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)

People, Way

“Thus feminism is more than contesting the discursive positioning of women; feminism involves peaceable households and cooperative child care, and so on. The labour movement tries to create more democratic workplaces; anti-colonial movements build structures of self-government. All of these movements create new cultural forms and circulate new knowledge.”

Raewyn Connell book Masculinities

Source: Masculinities (1995), Chapter 9, pp. 229

Women, Knowledge, Self-confidence

“Hardly anyone expected the American uprising to succeed. Thousands of colonists emigrated to Canada or hid in the woods, certain that the king's armies would tear the colonial regiments to shreds. Nor did a majority of the people support the struggle for independence, even in theory. Historians estimate that one-third favored independence, one-third favored retaining British ties, and one-third were indifferent.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Five, The American Matrix for Transformation

People, Support, Tear, Indifference

““Violence” was a euphemism for a threat to the ruling order and its illusion of social peace, with which the class struggle, the brutality of patriarchy, and the murderousness of colonialism are hidden. The newspapers did not talk about violence when cops killed strikers, when landlords evicted families, or when poor people died of hunger. They talked about violence when workers went on strike, when tenants stopped paying rent, when street vendors refused to surrender their wares to the cops.”

Peter Gelderloos (1982) American anarchist

Source: "The Failure of Nonviolence" (2013) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-the-failure-of-nonviolence, Chapter 1. Violence Doesn't Exist

Hunger, People, Family, Peace

“By relating an ancient instance of white colonization in a dark subcontinent, it confirmed the colonial worldview.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Asterisk in bharopiyasthan: Minor writings on the Aryan invasion debate (2007)

Relation ships

“Commerce creates wealth, and it is the foundation of the great state. Armies are raised and paid for to win, or to protect the countries' trade, or commerce. Ships are constructed, colonies established, inventions encouraged, governments built up, or pulled down, for Commerce. Commerce cuts the way, and all professions, all arts follow.”

Harry Gordon Selfridge (1858–1947) America born English businessman

The Romance of Commerce (1918), Concerning Commerce

Art, Way, Relation ships, Country

“For too long, it was taken for granted that we would survive because we were Dutch; because Holland would take care of us. In our ignorant innocence or innocent ignorance we overlooked the fact that they were, and historically are, the rulers and we the ruled ones, and that power never renders itself; it has to be conquered, if not by sword then by the mind. And we neglected the mind. We have not studied our rulers well enough, otherwise we would have known that we were programmed to think that we are not programmed; that if we looked the other way long enough and denied the existence of colonialism it would automatically disappear. We forgot that we were trained not to see colonialism as colonialism.”

Joceline Clemencia (1952–2011) Curaçaoan writer

Source: Language is More Than Language in the Development of Curaçao https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000136432, 1999

Way, Thinking, Study, Training

“The imbalances of our political, social, cultural, spiritual condition must be turned into revolutionary action to overthrow this corrupt system of dutch colonial exploitation.”

Joceline Clemencia (1952–2011) Curaçaoan writer

Source: Source https://triunfodisablika.wordpress.com/2020/11/29/an-anti-colonial-anthem-joceline-clemencia/

“Our fathers, in New England, in the Middle Colonies, and in the South, brought African slaves to America for reasons of their own, which it is impossible to justify, and useless now to censure. The God of our fathers has set them free by overruling a vast amount of human selfishness and passion in long-continued political and military conflict. Let the dead past bury its dead. Forgetting the things which are behind, let us reach forth to those things which are before.”

John Albert Broadus (1827–1895) American pastor and theologian

"As to the Colored People" (1 February 1883), as quoted in Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary https://sbts-wordpress-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/sbts/uploads/2018/12/Racism-and-the-Legacy-of-Slavery-Report-v4.pdf#page=6 (December 2018), by R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, pp. 38–39

God, Passion, Past, Selfishness

“…it’s just another front in the battle against racism. And that’s what it was, because New Mexico was much more colonial than any other area, but it was all the same damn racism. And so I never felt like I was breaking any life pattern; I was just shifting to another front.…”

Elizabeth Martinez (1925) American community organizer, activist, author, and educator

On how she joined the Chicano Movement in “ELIZABETH (BETITA) MARTINEZ” https://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/transcripts/MartinezBetita.pdf (Voices of Feminism Oral History Project; 2006)

Life

“We have avoided the post-colonial nightmares of many a former British subject. Though that may arguably be because we were a nation, and not a randomly drawn jurisdiction without regard to ethnic loyalties or geographical sense, as were so many of the “countries” that emerged from Empire. We pride ourselves, not without cause, with only one Civil War since the foundation of the State and none within the 26 county area since the enactment of said Constitution. All’s well that ends well? Except that history is a process not a destination, and “well” or not it certainly hasn’t ended. And the foundational legal document of the State grows more convoluted with each amendment and increasingly difficult to define, even in the ordinary sense of a degree of certainty.”

Justin Barrett (1971) Irish activist

A New Constitution for a Real Republic https://nationalparty.ie/new-year-message-2020/ (July 27, 2018)

War, History, Sense, Loyalty

“Trading posts and colonies, gentlemen, have not only strengthened the commercial positions of the peoples concerned; these nations owe their greatness to these institutions.”

Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) King of the Belgians

Source: Leopold II, Het hele Verhaal, Johan Op De Beeck Horizon, 2020 https://klara.be/leopold-ii-aflevering-2-0 ISBN 9789463962094 Prince Leopold II in his function of Senator in the Senate of Belgium.

People

“I believe we must set up three children's colonies, the aim of these colonies is above all to furnish us with soldiers.”

Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) King of the Belgians

Source: King Leopold's Ghost https://vimeo.com/ondemand/kingleopoldsghost Leopold II in a letter to the Congo Governor General: Camille Janssen, 1890.

Children

“Of all the outlets, the safest and most stable, both for products and for capital, is obviously that of a colony.”

Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) King of the Belgians

Quotes related to the Belgian Colonial Empire Source: All the King's Men' A search for the colonial ideas of some advisers and "accomplices" of Leopold II (1853-1892). (Hannes Vanhauwaert), Preface:A historiographical picture of Leopold II (1835-1909) http://www.ethesis.net/leopold_II/leopold_II.htm#2.%20 STENGERS, J. “The place of Leopold II in the history of colonization.” The New Clio, I-II (1949-1950), 517.

“When several imperialist powers seek to plunder the weaker nations of the world, the result is an imperialist world war for the redistribution of colonies. And this crime, the most monstrous in world history, is committed by the bourgeoisie under the banner of “nationalism.””

Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969) 2nd President of the People's Republic of China (1898-1969)

Internationalism and Nationalism (1952) Source: "1.The Bourgeois-Nationalist Concept of the Nation" https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1952/internationalism_nationalism/ch01.htm

War, World, History

“Eminent scholars repeatedly make the logically contradictory claim that colonialism was both too disruptive and not disruptive enough.”

Bruce Gilley (1966) researcher

Source: The Case for Colonialism: A Response to My Critics, Page 5 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352039835_The_Case_for_Colonialism_A_Response_to_My_Critics The case for colonialism, Gilley, 2017

“The struggle for liberation was terrible. We were bruised and wounded by colonialism.”

Ahmed Ben Bella (1916–2012) First President of Algeria

"Ben Bella: ‘It protected us from hatred’" in Le Monde diplomatique https://mondediplo.com/2000/09/14ben-bella (September 2000)

“The August Revolution was a revolution of national liberation. It aimed at liberating the Vietnamese people from the colonial yoke and making Vietnam an independent nation.”

Trường Chinh (1907–1988) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (1907-1988)

Source: The August Revolution (1946) (excerpts), p.42

People

Quotes about colonialism page 5

Quotes about colonialism
page 5