John Oliver Quotes

We have a full right, by our own best wisdom, and then even by compulsion to dictate terms and conditions to them [Native Americans] .... The Indian must be made to feel he is in the grasp of a superior.

I bring you this stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.

Those who oppressed us described us as the Dark Continent!

Africa suffered under European dominance for centuries.

Do you think that the people of South Africa, or anywhere on the continent of Africa, or India, or Pakistan are longing to be kicked around all over again?

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 decades of Imperialism have been prolific in wars; most of these wars have been directly motived by aggression of white races upon "lower races," and have issued in the forcible seizure of territory. Every one of the steps of expansion in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific has been accompanied by bloodshed; each imperialist Power keeps an increasing army available for foreign service; rectification of frontiers, punitive expeditions, and other euphemisms for war ...

We should be lords over them…these are the politics of South Africa.

It is impossible for white men to live with the coloured races without adopting a conviction that…they have the right to command the services of the less civilized.

The cruelties committed against the Hottentots exceed everything that is said about it in Cape Town or what can be imagined.

We are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race.

The whites tell us of their enlightened understanding, and the wisdom they have from heaven, at the same time, they cheat us to their hearts’ content. For we are as fools in their eyes, and they say among themselves, the Indians know nothing!

It is not right that a servile race should inhabit the same locality which their ancestors inhabited in power and glory.

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.

The case for intervention is overwhelming … The spectacle of thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots …

The Cambodians [Khmer] are so stupid that we must frighten them. Ordinary moral suasion has no effect.

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

The more we work and the less we talk, the better it will be. If we lean this lesson of imperialism, we will keep our empire.

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

Might not the inhabitants of Africa, with still greater justice on their side, than we have on ours, cross the Atlantic, seize our citizens, carry them into Africa, and make slaves of them, provided they were able to do it? But should this be really the case, every corner of the globe would reverberate with the sound of African oppression; so loud would be our complaint, and so “feeling our appeal” to the inhabitants of the world at large. We should represent them as a lawless, piratical set of unprincipled robbers, plunderers and villains, who basely prostituted the superior power and information, which God had given them for worthy purposes to the vilest of all ends. We should not hesitate to say that they made use of those advantages only to infringe upon every dictate of justice; to trample under foot every suggestion of principle, and to spurn, with contempt, every right of humanity.

The white man arrogated to himself the right to rule and to be obeyed by the non-white.

The British Empire wasn't some project designed to bring enlightenment to ignorant savages, but rather a brutal and rapacious exploitation of peoples who were often more humane than us.

Everything that America has done crudely and shamelessly to suppress the Negro, England in Sierra Leone has done legally and suavely …

How many, even of the better sort, would choose to be slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?

African slaves, the substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it.