Thomas Sankara Quotes

Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.

Base is the slave that pays.

Imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail . We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on earth to rule all of humanity.

Imperialist aid is a noose of plunder and subjugation, aimed at robbing 10 and even 100 things for one thing that is given.

So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. It's an empire. There's no two ways about it. It's a huge empire. It's been extremely successful.

The British minister mistakes the Irish character. Had he intended to make Ireland a slave, he should have kept her a beggar. There is no middle policy … greatly emancipate or fundamentally destroy.

How easy it would be to govern this country and make it rich, but how uphill work it is to influence a native ruler pulled by all interested consuls and traders. This ought to be a British protectorate …

Slavery was forced upon us by the most extremist exigency of circumstances in a struggle for very existence. Without it, it is doubtful whether a white man would now be existing on this continent--certain that, if there were, they would be in a states of the utmost destitution, weakness, and misery.

America, which up to the arrival of the Europeans had but one cereal, maize, and but one domestic animal for labor, the llama, and we can rejoice that the Europeans imported with themselves and their tools the ox, the ass and the horse, corn, cotton, sugarcane, coffee and finally the vine and the orange tree, creating there a new world of that glorious society which produces merchandise and which with an extraordinary swiftness of movement has already traversed the two phases of the blackest slavery and the most democratic wage system.

The remarkable economic development of their country under Japanese auspices has not, however, escaped the bitter criticism of the Formosan Chinese. Japan's policy, they believe, is simply that of vicious exploitation. In the early days of the occupation they were robbed of the richest lands in the island by terror and chicanery. The Japanese Government has monopolized the production and sale of camphor, tobacco, salt, opium, sake, and other spirits, the most profitable Formosan industries. The Formosans claim that their resources and labor are exploited by Japanese capitalists, and that the tariff laws give Japan a monopoly of the market and compel them to pay monopoly prices. In a word, it is their belief that the Japanese and a few rich Formosans whose political support they have purchased are the only ones who profit by the development of the country..

We denounce the mercenary system of foreign policy under recent administrations in the interest of financial imperialists, oil monopolists, and international bankers, which has at times degraded our State Department from its high service as a strong and kindly intermediary of defenseless governments to a trading outpost of those interest and concession seekers engaged in the exploitation of weaker nations, as contrary to the will of the American people, destructive of domestic development and provocative of war.

I have never been able to procure sufficient slaves to cultivate my lands and that of any guilt that attached to this trade we [planters] were at most but partners with the Parliament which tolerated it, and the country which profited so much from it.

Fatherless children were left in little better condition than slaves, for if their Parents die in debt, their children are made bondmen till the debt be discharged.

Remember this: debt is a form of bondage. It is a financial termite.

Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did.

As long as imperialism exists it will, by definition, exert its domination over other countries. Today that domination is called neocolonialism.

Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa

You Americans, you treat the Third World in the way an Iraqi peasant treats his new bride. Three days of honeymoon, and then it's off to the fields.

We've got some new ways to make slaves here.

We never leave our roots. We just grow new branches.

A well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave.

You can cuss out colonialism, imperialism, and all other kinds of ism, but it's hard for you to cuss that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, your soul goes.

It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn’t dying.

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?

The expansion is inevitable.