Margaret Mead Quotes

Civilized men arrived in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers, and the Bible.

He was in time to witness the destruction of the Summer Palace at Peking--the act by which Lord Elgin, in the name of European civilization, took vengeance upon the barbarism of the East.

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

It is through the European that civilization arrives ... precisely because of their superiority, the civilized people our responsible for an evolving world.

These vast lands [Africa, South America, Asia]... need only assistance from us to be civilized.

After WWII .... the West exchanged the old racist coinage for new currency. "Uncivilized" became "underdeveloped". "Savage people" became the "third world". There was a genuine change of heart away from racism and toward respect for equality, but a paternalistic and coercive strain survived.

Third World countries feel that the liberal view of the world and way of life is at odds with their deepest aspirations and self-conceptions. As they understand it, liberalism breaks up the community, undermines the shared body of ideas and values, places the isolated individual above the community, encourages the ethos and ethic of aggressive self-assertion, rejects traditional wisdom and common sense in the name of scientific reason, and weakens the spirit of mutual accommodation and adjustment.

I had been preserved from the spirit-breaking Indian schools… My psychology, therefore, had not been shot to pieces by that cheap attitude of the Indian service, whose one aim was to “civilize” the race youth, by denouncing his parents, his customs, his people wholesale, and filling the vacuum they had created with their vulgar notions of what constituted civilization.

They seem to me to leave the Indians in a worse condition than they found them in.

Americans intentionally deride what people in the Old World hold sacred.

The mission of colonization cannot be other than a mission of high civilization.

Civilization, or extinction, has been the fate of all people who have found themselves in the track of the advancing Whites

We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization.

Annexation [of Mexico] … because the United States is destined to supplant all other governments on this continent [and] … leading Mexico to a higher plane of civilization.

It doesn’t matter if we don’t consider ourselves an empire. Others see us as impinging on their lives, their way of life.

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.

The hostility to all Indian ways and culture that characterized so much of Government policy now appears to have been a mistake.

All preceding experiments for the improvement of the Indians have failed. It seems now to be an established fact that they cannot live in contact with a civilized community and prosper.

The United States has always had little sympathy for the native and has always seen settlements as a positive and civilizing force….they saw the native as a squatter with no rights.

... there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them.

Went to the White drawing-room to receive three Chiefs from Bechuanaland,…. One of their chief objects in coming was to obtain a permit from the Government to suppress strong drink, which demoralises and kills the poor natives. Alas! everywhere this terrible evil, which has such a fatal effect on the population, seems to follow civilization!

I will devote the rest of my life to God’s plan and help to make the rest of the world English.

Only a few years after the permanent settlement of Virginia, some fifty missionaries arrived to begin the massive task of converting the heathen. The Indians on their part, did not respond with alacrity to the idea of adopting a culture that to them, in many cases, seemed barbarous, indeed.

While modern changes were intrinsic to Western historical development, they were largely seen by Muslims as alien and enforced.

To those who say derogatory things about colonialism, I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.