Smedley Butler Quotes

This notion that we're going to prop up foreign governments, that we're going to invade other countries for some kind of perceived benefit where we're going to install somebody who's going to be supportive of American interests or American corporate private interests needs to stop.

But, if you believe we should go around the world overturning regimes to make little United States, I don't agree with that, because I don't think we're capable of doing that.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Also, people are not often aware of the way the United States' policies influence what happens in places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua. Or in Columbia right now.

I've never seen America as an imperialist or colonialist or meddling country.

To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.

I wish Obama would focus on governing the United States and would forget his country's imperialist pretensions.

I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?

I love Washington, D.C.; I love this country, but I think over the last hundred years we've built up would I call an arrogant empire: people who think the rest of us are too stupid to make our own decisions.

I think no one knows what humanitarian intervention means. If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.

Warlords, dictators and terrorists are normally okay with the U.S., as long as they do the bidding of U.S. corporate interests.

The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.

Basically, what Economic Hit Men are trained to do is to build up the American empire. To create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we've been very successful.

I don’t think America wants democracies in the Middle East. They wouldn’t be nearly as friendly to us

I helped make Mexico...safe for American oil interests. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank …. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

The need to colonize a country in the old fashioned way is gone. Even in Iraq they will pull out. But Iraq will have McDonald's, Iraq will have American interests in there, America will be able to do its business there. They don't necessarily need to send in troops - they send in men in suits and they colonize the place financially. It's a cultural and financial imperialism

We should not act as if we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments.

William McKinley waged a war against Spain for no national interest except America's alleged "friendship" toward the Cuban rebels and our "traditional" anticolonialism. The only economic interest involved, namely Wall Street investors in Cuba, opposed the prospective war, since they preferred doing business with Cuba's Spanish overlords rather than with the insurgents. When McKinley started the war, however, the great "powers" of Wall Street promptly shut up and went along.

I am on the anti-imperialist left. The Stalinist left? I wouldn't define it that way because of the pejoratives loaded around it; … If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe.

The real threat to the world is the imperialistic threat posed by the U.S., and Israel is one of its imperialistic instruments in this part of the world.

The effects of U.S. intervention in Latin America have been overwhelming negative. They have had the effect of reinforcing brutal and unjust social systems and crushing people who are fighting for what we would actually call “American values.” In many cases, … we actually overthrew governments that had principles similar to ours and replaced those … leaders with people who detest everything the United States stands for.

If you want to look at the Monroe Doctrine and what happened when we wrote that, we stated what the business would be for America's power, especially in this hemisphere. We have always been the colonizer of this hemisphere, wherever we've been.

The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war. It wants peace, but what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last hundred years in Latin America and in the world?

The United States was born with an imperialist impulse. There has been a long confrontation between Monroe and Bolivar... It is necessary that the Monroe Doctrine be broken.

The U.S. has made a lot of mistakes all over the world... look at Iraq. The country that makes such mistakes do not have the moral right to teach the world.