Roland Barthes Quotes

A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization.

It's the oldest story in human existence. We've colonized someone or been colonized throughout human history. It's amazing how fast we comply and try to get a life out of that.

Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels. They gathered mountains and valleys, rivers and whole horizons, the way a man might now gain tittle to building lots.

To say that certainly America was very lucky to get a large amount of land, and the native Indians were extremely unlucky to have white men coming over here, is one thing. But to say that the whole of the American prosperity was based on exploiting the indigenous population would be a great mistake.

Had it not been for the Atlantic Ocean and the virgin wilderness, the United States would never have been the Land of Promise.

In the past, on Earth, it has largely been to exploit foreign resources and to expand the domestic territory.

Every country we conquer feeds us. And these are just a few of the good things we'll have when this war is over. Slaves working for us everywhere while we sit back with a fork in our hands and a whip on our knees.

We practically own everything in the Philippines.

Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.

The mission of colonization cannot be other than a mission of high civilization.

Destiny beckons us to hold and civilize Mexico.

I ought to be judged as a captain who set out from Spain to the Indies to conquer many warlike peoples of very contrary creed and customs, where by divine will, I have placed under the sovereignty of the King and Queen, Our Lords, another world, by which Spain, which was once called poor, is now the most rich.

They would make fine servants .... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so imperialism is in the mind of the imperialized.

It is impossible not to look forward to distant times when our rapid multiplication will expand … and cover the whole northern if not the southern continent.

The white man expelled the Indian, took his possessions, developed the unexplored resources, and now he devotes a portion of his accumulations to establish institutions where the red man learn the secret and method of his power.

The plundering goes merrily on. The explorer reconnoiters the ground, the missionary prepares the soil, the trader “works” it. The time is then ripe for protectorates and annexations, followed by the wholesale conversion of the refractory nation, by fire and sword it other means fail

Those countries cannot be in better hands, my fear is that the Spaniards are too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece.

The destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent -- to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean... to change darkness into light and confirm the destiny of the human race.

The pioneer army perpetually... strikes to the front. Empire plants itself upon the trails.

When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the Land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.

The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies.

When America was first made known to Europe, the part assumed by France on the borders of that new world was peculiar, and is little recognized. While the Spaniard roamed sea and land, burning for achievement, red-hot with bigotry and avarice, and while England, with soberer steps and a less dazzling result, followed in the path of discovery and gold-hunting, it was from France that those barbarous shores first learned to serve the ends of peaceful commercial industry.

Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

A new bubble will replace the old one. A new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one. In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped.