Han Suyin Quotes

The future condition of the conquered power depends on the will of the conquerer.

Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.

Imperialism dies hard, especially when there are people making money.

Imperialism is a false system for reasons which all but imperialists now accept.

Colonialism is the cousin of slavery.

In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments.

The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

By seeing the problem of poverty merely in terms of assistance, we overlook that our enormous economic advantage is deeply tainted by how it accumulated over the course of one historical process that has devastated the societies and cultures of four continents.

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.

America is an empire. I hope you know that now. All empires, by definition, are bumbling, shambolic, bullying, bureaucratic affairs, as certain of the rightness of their cause in infancy, as they are corrupted by power in their dotage.

Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.

In the past, the greatest weapon the white man has had has been his ability to divide and conquer. If I take my hand and slap you, you don't even feel it. It might sting you because these digits are separated. But all I have to do to put you back in your place is bring those digits together.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

The white man's dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities.

New York is a woman / holding, according to history, / a rag called liberty with one hand / and strangling the earth with the other.

Look how the whole capitalist world is stretching out long arms towards the barbarous world and grabbing and clutching in eager competition at countries whose inhabitants don't want them; nay, in many cases, would rather die in battle, like the valiant men they are, than have them

There is no birthright in the white skin that it shall say that wherever it goes, to any nation, amongst any people, there the people of the country shall give way before it, and those to whom the land belongs shall bow down and become its servants.

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

People who bear the brunt of dominant economic and military power have always resented, even hated, the subordination they experience while admiring grudgingly the institutions that sustain the subordination.

Would you rather lead an army of slaves?

It is idle to attack Imperialism or Militarism as political expedients or policies unless the axe is laid at the economic root of the tree, and the classes for whose interest Imperialism works are shorn of the surplus revenues which seek this outlet.

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.