American Imperialism Quotes

I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land. ~ Mark Twain

Eventually my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into can't: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized. ~ Barack Obama

The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization. ~ Noam Chomsky

As to the efficacy of the policy recommended by Rostow, it speaks for itself: no country, once underdeveloped, ever managed to develop By Rostow's stages. Is that why Rostow is now trying to help the people of Vietnam, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and other underdeveloped countries to overcome the empirical, theoretical, and policy shortcomings of his manifestly non-communist intellectual aid to economic development and cultural change by bombs, napalm, chemical and biological weapons, and military occupation? ~ Andre Gunder Frank

[I]f you think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form is the most dangerous thing in the world, that means you don't think the Islamic Republic of Iran or North Korea or the Taliban is as bad. ~ Christopher Hitchens

We are not anti-American. we do not dislike Americans though we abhor American imperialism in all its manifestations. But then, so do many Americans. Many of them have said that even more forthrightly than we have, and many of them have suffered more than any of us for their plain speaking. ~ Tommy Douglas

Mr. President, call the toady of American imperialism to order. ~ Nikita Khrushchev

As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism. ~ Angela Davis

A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape - Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this - the section 'At the Hospital' has the term solsaga ('I have loose bowels'), and the section 'Our Foreign Friends Say' contains the Korean for 'President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.'
I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida ('We have a bumper harvest every year'). ~ Christopher Hitchens

Until America begins to build a moral record in her dealings with the Indian people she should not try to fool the rest of the world about her intentions on other continents. America has always been a militantly imperialistic world power eagerly grasping for economic control over weaker nations. ~ Vine Deloria Jr.

Theres no hope, none, of ever talking about it without pissing somebody, if not everybody, off ... By the end of this hour I will be seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer, a Zionist tool. a self-hating Jew, an apologist for American imperialism, an orientalist, socialist, fascist, CIA agent, and worse. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.) ~ Christopher Hitchens

Monotonous talk of the end of American hegemony, the universal cliché of the period, is mostly a way of avoiding mounting a serious opposition to it. ~ Tariq Ali

The truth is that neither British nor American imperialism was or is idealistic. It has always been driven by economic or strategic interests. ~ Charley Reese

A big part of the story is American imperialism, and the flip side of that is the building up of the national security state here at home. ~ Peter Kuznick

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898. ~ Noam Chomsky

Among the privileges of being a superpower, the right and the ability to make a local quarrel into a global one ranks very high. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Well, if you're talking about the current climate, there's a lack of content in American film because I think people are deeply confused about their emotions, and they don't regret certain aspects of their own foreign policy. ~ Neil Jordan

Man's obsession with his own wants is taking him further from those without whom happiness cannot be found. It is taking him from his people. ~ Anasazi Foundation

In 1930, more than 20% of the American population was employed in agriculture. Today it's less than 2%. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The President is aware of what is going on. That is not to say that something is going on. ~ Ron Ziegler

We're subject to the same forces of capitalism that have built the entire American economy. Strong returns induce more capital flow, which creates more competitors, and you have to evolve and get better, or you die. ~ Kenneth C. Griffin

One overall conclusion is plain: under the weight of the combined impact of exploding pluralism, the expansion of the state, and emerging separationism, the early American settlement, so brilliantly described by Tocqueville, is gone, and gone for good. ~ Os Guinness

Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had. ~ James Baldwin

We are studying American history for the ninth time in nine years. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

Iacocca made his pitch: He wanted Ford to build the Fiesta, but with a Honda engine and transmission in it. Honda was delighted: He would like nothing better than this joint production with an American company, whose very name he revered. The price of the Japanese parts would be only $711. He could deliver 300,000 and do it quickly. Iacocca was even more delighted; he had an instant car and an unbeatable one at that. It could be in the dealers' showrooms in only eighteen months. ~ David Halberstam

In the West Indies and South America, slaves were worked to death and replaced with fresh imports, but in the continental North American colonies of Great Britain the situation was the opposite. By about 1710, as Morgan notes, "Virginia's slave population began to grow from natural increase, an unprecedented event for any New World slave population.…In 1700 Virginia had 13,000 slaves; in 1730, 40,000; in 1750, 105,000, of whom nearly 80 percent were Virginia born. ~ Henry Wiencek

When I was a kid I got so much help from the Church. When I was a kid, our family was so poor they couldn't afford me to go to school, so there was an American family that send the money to the church to support my school fees. ~ John Woo

American citizens are instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equally in violation of the laws of humanity and in defiance of those of their own country. The same just and benevolent motives which produced interdiction in force against this criminal conduct will doubtless be felt by Congress in devising further means of suppressing the evil. ~ James Madison

Thanks to Barack Obama, America is for the first time aligning its values with those of 'the majority of the world's population.' If you think the world's population has had better values than America, that is has made societies that are more open, free, and tolerant than American society, and that is has fought for others' liberty more than America has, you should be delighted. ~ Dennis Prager

I'm in a weird band. We've done very well. The American Dream is alive and well. ~ Gene Simmons

Right now too much American time and resources are spent dealing with situations caused by our dependence on oil that we import from unstable countries. ~ Dan Lipinski

The argument starts by accepting that the American government will continue to spend a huge amount of money on income transfers. It then contends that we should take all of that money and give it back to the American people in cash grants. The ~ Charles Murray

First, the very idea that there should be any serious kind of health insurance for Americans (beyond tiny elites) simply did not have much reality until World War II - and it was (again) the war that gave it reality. With wartime labor scarce, wage-price controls were enacted to keep bidding wars in check. Corporations, unable to offer more pay, tried to compete with benefits instead. The modern idea of widespread employer-provided health insurance developed as a strategy to attract wartime workers, and continued in many industries after the war, especially during the boom era. ~ Gar Alperovitz

I had to choose between American and British actors, and it didn't take me more than a second to decide: Russians are Europeans and should be played by other Europeans. ~ Jean-Jacques Annaud

I will barnstorm American living rooms. Mainstream media will be unable to ignore me, but more importantly they will be unable to overlook the needs of average Americans in the run-up to the 2012 election. ~ Roseanne Barr

What I dislike about movie culture is that it often presents a parable of our problems - but the issues are all straightforward and the people are either nice or they're not. In real life, everyone falls between those perimeters, but not many American films operate in that grey area. ~ Julian Fellowes

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War. ~ Anson Mount

Who knew an elf queen could be so vicious! ~ Meg Cabot

American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them. ~ Spike Lee

Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it. ~ Rudy Giuliani

Even if, personally, I'm in a place of contentment or solidity, I feel like it's hard not to look out into American culture and see vast inequity, widespread institutionalized violence and racism and transphobia and environmental destruction. It's hard to be in this world and feel a sense of innate satisfaction at all. There's plenty of things to feel unsettled about. ~ Carrie Brownstein

The almost egregiously English couple, Cedric and Rosamund Chailey, had slipped quietly away when the conversation turned to God. It had not seemed polite to be present when anything so American was being discussed. ~ Michael Frayn

Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge. ~ James Thurber

What [American universities] need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists - all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few 'conservatives'. ~ Grover Furr

One of the great things and one of the horrible things about the American character is this extraordinary optimism and arrogance that everything will continue to be great and keep looking up. ~ John Wells

Will "trigger warnings" simply be a way of establishing a new secular index, a cautionary list of books and other works dangerous not for religious reasons but because they may offend or upset certain groups or individuals or that contain material which can be viewed as insensitive or inappropriate? Would Grapes of Wrath be upsetting to someone with bad memories of rural poverty? Will the near future necessitate warning labels in front of all published material? Will future editions of The Best American Essays, for example, include a trigger warning in front of each selection so readers can avoid material that might upset them? And will trigger warnings in themselves eventually cause upsetting reactions, just the words and images sufficing to evoke unpleasant memories or anxious responses? ~ John Jeremiah Sullivan

Black vintners in this country make some really great wines. Explore a wine list and you will find at least one of our wines in the best restaurants. Buy a bottle for your table, and let management know you appreciate them including a Black winemaker in their stock. ~ Andre Hueston Mack

It was a pleasure to work with everybody at 'American Idol' and to be able to be part of the 'Idol' family. ~ Katie Stevens

The American dream is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American dream is that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become. ~ Ronald Reagan

The violence of hierarchy is the violence that the powerful use against the dispossessed to keep them subordinated. As an example, the violence committed for wealth is socially invisible or committed at enough of a distance that its beneficiaries don't have to be aware of it. This type of violence has defined every imperialist war in the history of the US that has been fought to get access to "natural resources" for corporations to turn into the cheap consumer goods that form the basis of the American way of life. ~ Lierre Keith

I thought what would be really just choice for a revamp and a reboot is 'The Greatest American Hero.' I think I'd be just that kind of perfect not prepared for this kind of thing, but thrust into circumstances he's not prepared for ... that's another niche of mine. Unpreparedness. Not knowing what to do. I'm good at being that guy. ~ Nathan Fillion

I propose the immediate launching of a nuclear strike on the United States. The Cuban people are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the destruction of imperialism and the victory of world revolution. ~ Fidel Castro