David Harvey Quotes

Rosa Luxemburg maintained that the capitalist system can keep up its rate of investment (and therefore its profits) only so long as it is expanding geographically.

Imperialism is not the creation of any one or any one group of states.

There's a belief that since Africa got a raw deal from the colonial West, then the Chinese must be Africa's best friend. But the evidence doesn't show that, and the main criticism is that they are building infrastructure in exchange for Africa's resources in deals that are structured to favor China.

The white man's dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities.

White men have two hands. The stronger hand is the hand of war. The other hand is the hand of trade. Which hand do the Abanhos want?

Commerce is the weapon …., the all powerful arm with which we have entered in earnest, with every prospect of success, upon our conquest of Mexico.

It is idle to attack Imperialism or Militarism as political expedients or policies unless the axe is laid at the economic root of the tree, and the classes for whose interest Imperialism works are shorn of the surplus revenues which seek this outlet.

…empire follows the balance of property, whether lodged in one, a few, or many hands.

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

What we have is a more sophisticated form of imperialism, which is economic. But lurking in the background, always ready to go, is an armed force.

The Britisher is the top dog and the Indian the underdog in his own country.

My decision to destroy the authority of the blacks in Saint Domingue (Haiti) is not so much based on considerations of commerce and money, as on the need to block for ever the march of the blacks in the world.

Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.

While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce. But let the white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs.

In our culture privacy is often confused with secrecy. Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings - where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to. Keeping secrets is usually about power, about hiding and concealing information.

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

A unipolar world - one with only one power - makes sure that this space almost disappears. In a multipolar world this space multiplies. Therefore, there is nostalgia for a multipolar world.

The cottage industry of India had to perish in order that Lancashire might flourish.

Not in the name of a necessary protection of the white race did the European break into China, but for the benefit of the Jewish-mercantile greed for profit. He thus dishonored himself, destroying a whole civilization, provoking justified indignation. China fights for its myth, for its race, and its ideals, as does the renewal-movement in Germany against the mercantile race that rules all stock markets and the actions of most governments.

Any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence, for any use means the intrusion of a human body into a given space, the intrusion of one order into another.

Every exploration is an appropriation.

I think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world. The US is the Western empire of the 19th century regrouping in the 20th, not out of wickedness, but because everybody else in Eurasia was so completely destroyed by the Second World War. Economically, that was quite a useful time for the US, so they ended up in the position of enormous power. And like any great power, they're going to act in their own interests. The problem is due to what the business community wants, which is to make as much money as they can out of what other people do and pay as little as possible for it.

Although the mass of the people accepted the white man's God, either under physical duress or because he seemed more powerful than their own Gods, they never assimilated the ideas of Christianity.

Russia was a slave in Europe but would be a master in Asia.

Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.