William Easterly Quotes

The idea of progress has a couple of contradictions … it leads to Eurocenterism….

Take up the White Man's burden— In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain, To seek another's profit And work another's gain. Take up the White Man's burden— The savage wars of peace— Fill All the mouth of Famine, And bid the sickness cease.

The things and ways the West took to the rest have become the ways of the world.

[For those peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization .... the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations ...

Western interests: imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, racism, and other negative -isms.

We all know what is meant by the term 'international community,' don't we? It's the West, of course, nothing more, nothing less. Using the term 'international community' is a way of dignifying the West, of globalising it, of making it sound more respectable, more neutral and high-faluting.

As someone from a developing country, I have a problem with rich countries thinking they can tell us anything, simply because they are giving money.

The industrialized world was dominating the processes of change in the Third World, in particular in the Islamic world. And, that domination resulted in educational processes that were shaped by the First World.

It is culturally condescension to say that some countries are not ready for democracy.

Why in the world should any sensible person give a damn what some spokesman for cannibalistic tribes or slave-holding nomads thinks about nuclear tests?

Take up the white man's burden — Send forth the best ye breed — Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need.

So ubiquitous is Western influence that most of the time it is no longer seen as an alien element intruding into non-Western societies. It is an influence that has become integrated into the mind and body, the heart and soul of the non-Western human being. Western dominance, in other words, has become normal, it has become natural. By making it so natural and so normal to be 'Western', the centres of power in the West have achieved their ultimate triumph.

The main reason western culture has been dominant is because Europeans have controlled political, economic and social power including educational policy for the last several centuries.

The US became arrogant because of what it owns of weapons and technology. For that, it handles the world as it pleases, and changes the ideologies of people, their habits and ethics in order to spread Western culture at the expense of Islam.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he less savage than the other savages.

Don't fall into the trap of imagining that the West can remake societies

The great question of the 20th century is whether the Anglo-Saxon of the Slav is to impress his civilization upon the world.

I have been obsequious toward Western civilization, exaggerating its merits and, at the same time, exaggerating my own merits.

You can't be in business with international development and not understand basic issues of colonialism, postcolonialism and white privilege.

To the extent that the West is to blame at all for the ills of the Third World it is to the extent that the West created Marx and his successors, among whom must be numbered many of those who advised the Third World leaders in post-war years.

The domination of western values, beliefs and way of life has angered many from the east and in developing countries.

I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception.

'Orientalism' has successfully built my critical awareness to question and see the big picture of knowledge, perspective or idea from a Western point of view and always see things from different perspective.

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.

At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the West towards other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian.