Colonial Mindset Quotes

Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no products within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce. But the tea, silk and porcelain which the Celestial Empire produces are absolute necessities to European nations and to yourselves, we have permitted, as a signal of our favor, that private hongs should be established at Canton, so that your wants might be supplied and your country thus participate in our beneficence.

There can be no friends more benevolent than the British.

Your map of Africa is really quite nice. But my map of Africa lies in Europe. Here is Russia, and here... is France, and we're in the middle — that's my map of Africa.

Still often interventionist, convinced of our importance in the world, even those of us born long after 1900 live in a country that is much more Victorian than we think.

I am not a magician. I believe that it is the Indians who have got to find out a solution. You cannot expect the British to solve all your problems.

The world still consists of two clearly divided groups: the English and the foreigners. One group consists of less than 50 million people; the other of 3,950 million. The latter group does not really count.

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

The white explorers had been my heroes. The Aborigines, I thought they were real savages. That was what I'd been taught and that's what I believed.

I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the value of the Orientals themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.

Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.

ßome would not be governed by white men, and some would not be governed by black men, and some would not be governed by mulattoes; but the truth was they did not want to be governed by anybody

If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.

To get rid of the infatuation for English is one of the essentials of Swaraj.

In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.

You say, for example, “Why do the Indians till the ground and live as we do?” May we not ask with equal propriety, “Why do not the white people hunt and live as we do?”

Self-preservation's a man's first duty. And natives don't mind dying, you know. They don't feel about it as Europeans do.

[There is] no Indian problem as created by the Indian himself. Every problem that exists today in regard to the Indian population is due to the white man’s cast of mind.

White settlers possessed no traditions and institutions comparable to the Indians' hospitality and sharing, adoption, and complete social integration. ...Whites who educated Indians did so with the idea that the Indians would return to their own people as missionaries to spread the gospel, not that they might become functioning parts of White society.

The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased... They can't conceive an independent Arab government. Nor, I confess, can I. There is no one here who could run it

That those tribes [the Sac and Fox Indians] cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizensis certain. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition.

The peace treaties of…Western nations…no more fit the Asian governments than a stove pipe hat would fit an African savage.

Only Europeans can decide what is best for Europe.

"Native" always means people who belong someplace else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows that the white race does not really think they belong anywhere, because they think of everybody else as native.

It did not come naturally; in fact, it would be difficult to conceive of any more dogmatic and less tolerant people than the first settlers on New England shores.

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.