Richard Southwell Bourke, 6th Earl of Mayo Quotes

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.

Take up the White Man's burden— In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain, To seek another's profit And work another's gain. Take up the White Man's burden— The savage wars of peace— Fill All the mouth of Famine, And bid the sickness cease.

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.

Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at understanding the people they were governing.

I cannot see anything but disaster in delaying to let the natives know that if the English government is non—aggressive it is so from a sense of justice, and from no want of power.

The white race seems to me to blame in saying that all the reason for its interference in Africa is the improvement of the native African, and then to start on altering African institutions without in the least understanding them. It seems to me that the leading men among the European educated Africans have depended too much on the religious side of the question.

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...

The idea of governing provinces and colonies by force is visionary and chimerical. The experiment has often been tried, and it has never succeeded. It ends infallibly in the ruin of one country or the other.

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

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.

You have introduced Western education, with freedom of speech and freedom of writing.... Side by side with these there have been great evils. One such evil is a steady dwarfing of the race in consequence of its exclusion from power.

The British government in India constitutes a struggle between the Modern Civilization, which is the Kingdom of Satan, and the Ancient Civilization, which is the kingdom of God.

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

For a parcel of men, with long heads, to sit down in England, and frame laws for us, and pretend to dictate how we are to live, of whom they know nothing, never having been in a black man’s country during the whole course of their lives, is to me somewhat extraordinary!

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

It's a fact that Anglo-Saxon supremacy impacts other cultures. That is plain and simple.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

Britons are good, though often brutal, colonists where they come into relations with entirely uncivilized tribes whose past is so remote as to be forgotten. But they trample with their heavy boots over the sensitive, delicate susceptibilities of an ancient, highly civilized and cultured nation, such as India.

Those who oppressed us described us as the Dark Continent!

Our practical success in preserving order, securing justice and developing the material resources of many of our colonies is largely due to the fact that we have learnt to employ native agents wherever possible for detailed work of administration, and to adapt our government, where it can be safely done, to native conditions.

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 ...

In every sphere the Europeans must retain the right to rule the country and to keep it a white man’s country.

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

Instruction! Instruction! is what the Boers lack above all else; they call themselves Christians, and Kaffirs and Hottentots heathen, and for this reason they believe that they are permitted anything.

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