Mark Twain Quotes

Nowhere is Universalism welcomed and encouraged by a people; everywhere governments have forced and are forcing Universalism upon unwilling and resistant subjects.

The US intervened in the Philippines to uplift and christianize the backward people, killing a couple of hundred thousand of them and destroying the place. The same thing happened in Haiti, the same thing happened with other countries.

Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?

The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.

Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.

For cultural invasion to succeed, it is essential that those invaded become convinced of their intrinsic inferiority.

Part of the process of colonization (cultural conquest and domination) is the replacement of the celebrated drugs of the colonized with the celebrated drugs of the colonizer.

O Muslims! When a Muslim blindly imitates the West, he turns into a loyal supporter of their beliefs and customs; he is like one who tries to reform something but spoils it while he is unaware. He is just like a defeated follower, like a baby who bites and severs his mother's breast while it is in his mouth. Such a person does not know that blind copying of the West involves hidden hazards and that our rights, honor and dignity are violated by such imitation and imbecilic pride.

Unlike more traditional conquerors, we are not content merely to subdue others: We insist that they be like us.

When someone tries to take over a country or a culture, they destroy the art.

Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?

England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.

All cultures forged by nations—the noble indigenous past of America, the brilliant civilization of Europe, the wise history of Asian nations, and the ancestral wealth of Africa and Oceania—are corroded by the American way of life. In this way, neoliberalism imposes the destruction of nations and groups of nations in order to reconstruct them according to a single model. This is a planetary war, of the worst and cruelest kind, waged against humanity.

Spanish civilization crushed the Indian. English civilization scorned and neglected him. French civilization embraced and cherished him.

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.

When Western civilization invaded the Near and Far East and what is now called the Third World it imposed its own ideas of a proper environment and a rewarding life. Doing this, it disrupted the delicate patterns of adaptation and created problems that had not existed before.

All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.

Your new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half child.

In North Africa they had the Arab with the gun and whip, but he could force people to do things ... and he accomplished a tremendous amount of extermination, but he certainly didn't advance that civilization very much.

Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.

When did one man ever civilize a people?

I know that we're being inexorably taken over by the Americans. Without a doubt. I don't mean invaded or anything like that, just taken over. By degrees.

The power which the Hellenes and even the Italians possessed, of civilizing and assimilating to themselves the nations susceptible of culture with whom they came into contact, was wholly wanting in the Phoenicians.

I believed that English-speaking people had a divine mission to civilize the world by making it western, democratic and Christian.

…if you suffer the Englishmen to dwell in your midst, their diseases and poisons shall destroy you utterly and you shall die.