Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

Colonialism is the cousin of slavery.

We stole their babes and mothers, chiefs and braves Although we held the whip, you knew we were The real slaves To alchemy, human alchemy.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

What slavery really demonstrated was that we don't really know how to use energy wisely and that we can be incredibly abusive and barbaric.

There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

It the British System is the most gigantic system of slavery the world has yet seen, and therefore it is that freedom gradually disappears from every country over which England is enabled to obtain control.

Who colonized the other – us or them? Did Algeria colonize France, or vice versa? Did Egypt colonize England, or vice versa? We are the victims...

I most sincerely wish there was not a slave in the province. It has always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me—to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.

The enslavement of Africans [in America] built the world's strongest economy.

The masters wanted to keep their slaves, and the slaves, their masters.

Slavery is the cause of treason and sustains it everywhere it exists.

Who does not know that kings and rulers sprang from men who were ignorant of God, who assumed because of blind greed and intolerable presumption to make themselves masters of other men, their equals, by means of pride, violence, bad faith, murder, and almost every other kind of crime? Surely the devil drove them on.

If you white men are desirous of throwing away your lives it is no reasons we Arabs should. We travel little by little to get ivory and slaves and are years about it. But you white men look only for rivers and lakes and mountains, and you spend your lives for no reason and no purpose.

You are all in mortal sin, and live and die in it, because of the cruelty and tyranny you practice among these innocent peoples., Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these peoples, who dwelt quietly and peacefully on their own land? Wars in which you have destroyed such infinite numbers of them by homicides and slaughters never before heard of? Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather, you kill them, in order to extract and acquire gold every day? … Are these not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves? Don’t you understand this? Don’t you feel this? Why are you sleeping in such a profound lethargic slumber?

When the white man turns tyrant [colonialism], it is his own freedom he destroys.

In the history of the world, slavery has been and still is the normal condition of most men; all the great accumulations of property have been the result of slavery, and civilization was the result of property…. art, literature, science, architecture, beautiful women, and gentlemen of leisure all depend upon the forced labor of masses of ignorant men whom to make free would be a social crime.

Those who exercise power always arrange matters so as to give their tyranny the appearance of justice.

We have been told that…Britain is the mother and we are the children, that a filial duty and submission is due from us to her and that we ought to doubt our own judgment and presume that she is right, even when she seems to us to shake the foundations of government. But admitting we are children, have not children a right to complain when their parents are attempting to break their limbs, to administer poison, or to sell them to enemies for slaves?

Isn’t this [the United States] the Government that massacred the original inhabitants of the land of America? … who seized millions of Africans from their houses and carried them off into slavery…?

Can the pleasure of sweetening our tea with sugar grown by slaves make up for all the misery produced among our fellow creatures, the butchery of the human species by this detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men?

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.

We fought against British not because of the color of their skin but also because of the exploitative character of their government.

We live in a country that has profited for hundreds of years off the labor of individuals without having to pay for it.

Imperialism and slavery are no white male monopoly, but are everywhere from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia to India, China and Japan.