“And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, and the epitaph drear: ''A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.''”
“The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.”
“The reluctant obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it [The Territory] is worth. Empires which branch out widely are often more flourishing for a little timely pruning.”
“Keep our Empire undismembered guide our Forces by Thy Hand, gallant blacks from far Jamaica, Honduras and Togoland; protect them Lord in all their fights, and even more, protect the whites.”
“If Germany is to become a colonizing power, all I say is, ''God speed her!'' She becomes our ally and partner in the execution of the great purposes of Providence for the advantage of mankind.”
“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it.”
“Roman, remember that you shall rule the nations by your authority, for this is to be your skill, to make peace the custom, to spare the conquered, and to wage war until the haughty are brought low.”
“To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.”
“There is no human failure greater than to launch a profoundly important endeavor and then leave it half done. This is what the West has done with its colonial system. It shook all the societies in the world loose from their old moorings. But it seems indifferent whether or not they reach safe harbor in the end.”
“Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.”
“How marvelous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men's hands; cemented with men's honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human -- for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.”
“We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for ''political influence.'' We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. ''Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?''”