John Lothrop Motley Quotes

The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.

I believed that English-speaking people had a divine mission to civilize the world by making it western, democratic and Christian.

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

We Indians only know that schools will make our children like white people, and some of us do not like white people and their ways.

So ubiquitous is Western influence that most of the time it is no longer seen as an alien element intruding into non-Western societies. It is an influence that has become integrated into the mind and body, the heart and soul of the non-Western human being. Western dominance, in other words, has become normal, it has become natural. By making it so natural and so normal to be 'Western', the centres of power in the West have achieved their ultimate triumph.

Don't fall into the trap of imagining that the West can remake societies

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia... When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch... and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.

In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man's values.

Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.

All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history.

The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.

I know that we're being inexorably taken over by the Americans. Without a doubt. I don't mean invaded or anything like that, just taken over. By degrees.

The power which the Hellenes and even the Italians possessed, of civilizing and assimilating to themselves the nations susceptible of culture with whom they came into contact, was wholly wanting in the Phoenicians.

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

Barbarians always think of themselves as the bringers of civilization.

Part of the process of colonization (cultural conquest and domination) is the replacement of the celebrated drugs of the colonized with the celebrated drugs of the colonizer.

The French view globalization as synonymous with Americanization, the cultural imperialism that has filled France with bad food, bad films, and English words.

The culture of Saudi Arabia belongs to a past age. It is not appropriate for the age of globalization.

Unlike more traditional conquerors, we are not content merely to subdue others: We insist that they be like us.

We are the Romans of the modern world—the great assimilating people.

We never make conquests or ask any other nation to let us establish ourselves in their country as the English, the French and the Dutch have done.

All these shortcomings stem from the laziness of the Cambodians [Khmer]… teach them agriculture. As for language, they should be taught to speak Vietnamese. Our dress and table manners must also be followed. If there is any out-dated or barbarous custom that can be simplified or repressed, then do so.

The US became arrogant because of what it owns of weapons and technology. For that, it handles the world as it pleases, and changes the ideologies of people, their habits and ethics in order to spread Western culture at the expense of Islam.

When someone tries to take over a country or a culture, they destroy the art.