Colonialism is the policy of a powerful nation extending its control over weaker territories for economic exploitation and political dominance. It involves resource extraction, cultural imposition, and sometimes settler migration. Resistance often arises, leading to conflicts. While colonialism has waned since the mid-20th century due to decolonization movements, its effects persist in economic disparities, cultural assimilation, and geopolitical tensions. It’s widely seen as unjust, leaving lasting legacies of inequality and conflict.
Colonialism Quotes
1. “A State in the grip of neo-colonialism is not master of its own destiny. It is this factor which makes neo-colonialism such a serious threat to world peace.”
— Kwame Nkrumah
2. “The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.”
— Barack Obama
3. “But colonialism in its harshest forms is not only the exploitation of new nations by old, of dark skins by light, or the subjugation of the poor by the rich. My Nation was once a colony, and we know what colonialism means; the exploitation and subjugation of the weak by the powerful, of the many by the few, of the governed who have given no consent to be governed, whatever their continent, their class, their color.”
— John F. Kennedy
4. “We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
5. “Colonialism is the massive fog that has clouded our imaginations regarding who we could be, excised our memories of who we once were, and numbed our understanding of our current existence.”
— Waziyatawin
6. “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.”
— Samuel P. Huntington
7. “The native must realize that colonialism never gives anything away for nothing.”
— Frantz Fanon
8. “Colonialism deprives you of your self-esteem and to get it back you have to fight to redress the balance.”
— Imran Khan
9. “A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else.”
— George Bernard Shaw
10. “Africa is a paradox which illustrates and highlights neo-colonialism . Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s impoverishment.”
— Kwame Nkrumah
11. “You can cuss out colonialism, imperialism, and all other kinds of ism, but it’s hard for you to cuss that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, your soul goes.”
— Malcolm X
12. “Colonialism is an idea born in the West that drives Western countries – like France, Italy, Belgium, Great Britain – to occupy countries outside of Europe.”
— Ahmed Ben Bella
13. “Colonialism is known in its primitive form, that is to say, by the permanent settling of repressive foreign powers, with an army, services, policies. This phase has known cruel colonial occupations which have lasted 300 years in Indonesia.”
— Ahmed Ben Bella
14. “Just as a person who is always asserting that he is too good-natured is the very one from whom to expect, on some occasion, the coldest and most unconcerned cruelty, so when any group sees itself as the bearer of civilization this very belief will betray it into behaving barbarously at the first opportunity.”
— Simone Weil
15. “Here’s the reality. The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god.”
— Tim Wise
16. “Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?”
— Anthony Burgess
17. “If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial people, what kind of revolution are you waging?”
— Ho Chi Minh
18. “I hate imperialism. I detest colonialism. And I fear the consequences of their last bitter struggle for life. We are determined, that our nation, and the world as a whole, shall not be the play thing of one small corner of the world.”
— Sukarno
19. “The liquidation of colonialism is a trend of the times which no force can hold back.”
— Kim Jong Il
20. “Western interests: imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, racism, and other negative -isms.”
— Malcolm X
21. “Jews and Muslims ‘dialoguing’ has nothing to do with Palestine. The problem is settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation, not religion.”
— Remi Kanazi
22. “The only way to resist colonialism is through education.”
— Tariq Ramadan
23. “A country that relies on aid? Death is better than that. It stops you from achieving your potential, just as colonialism did.”
— Imran Khan
24. “The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and poor countries of the world.”
— Kwame Nkrumah
25. “The mistakes of the Iraq war are not only tactical and strategic, but historical. It is essentially a war of colonialism, attempted in the post-colonial age.”
— Zbigniew Brzezinski
26. “After two world wars, the collapse of fascism, nazism, communism and colonialism and the end of the cold war, humanity has entered a new phase of its history.”
— Hans Kung
27. “Is globalization about ‘the eradication of world poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?”
— Arundhati Roy
28. “The history of colonialism is long and bloody. And it continues today, in the shape of Western arrogance vis-à-vis everyone else. “Us against the rest of the world” is the formula that drives the West.”
— Abdul Sattar Abu Risha
29. “It is only the ending of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism and the attainment of world communism that can provide the conditions under which the RACE question can finally be abolished and eliminated.”
— Kwame Nkrumah
30. “We always said that our struggle was not only against the British as representatives of colonialism, it was against all the evil that existed in India. The evil of the feudal system, the evil of the system based on caste, the evil of economic injustice.”
— Indira Gandhi
31. “I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good!”
— Slavoj Žižek
32. “A lot of people say colonialism was ‘evil’ or whatever, but what have they really done with Africa since we gave it back to them? I don’t think it should be considered ‘racist’ to admit maybe ending apartheid did more harm than good in South Africa.”
— Zach Braff
33. “Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it’s much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.”
— Susan George
34. “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”
— Kwame Nkrumah
35. “Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.”
— Bill McKibben
36. “I don’t think that the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of independence is the key. It really is like colonialism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mother country. At first the colony is perceived as being treacherous. It’s a betrayal. Ultimately, it can be seen as the separation of a partner that could be very valuable as an equal rather than as something you dominate.”
— David Cronenberg
37. “There is a crisis of religious authority world wide, and there are many reasons. One is colonialism.”
— Mark Durie
38. “The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination.”
— Che Guevara
39. “Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.”
— Wole Soyinka
40. “I am opposed to globalism, I am opposed to colonialism, I am opposed to any sort of complusion of one nation over another. (…) I also deeply believe in human rights.”
— David Duke
41. “I won’t be a party to a conspiracy to mobilize the Arabs against the Persians. Only the forces of colonialism benefit from such a conspiracy. I won’t be a party to a conspiracy that splits Islam into two – Shiite Islam and Sunni Islam – mobilizing Sunni Islam against Shiite Islam.”
— Muammar al-Gaddafi
42. “We here in Egypt are fed up with U.S. colonialism.”
— Nawal El Saadawi
43. “If you don’t feel apologetic for slavery, if you don’t feel apologetic for colonialism, if you feel proud of it then say that.”
— Jesse Jackson
44. “Are you ready to sacrifice to end world hunger? To sacrifice to end colonialism? To end neo-colonialism? To end racism? To end sexism?”
— Assata Shakur
45. “I’m not a prophet I can only use historical reality to come to a view of the future, and my view is that Africa will return to being African and not European. The advent of colonialism was foreign to the country itself, but it will return to what it was before the Europeans arrived.”
— Wilbur Smith
46. “Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.”
— Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
47. “As Dutch, British and French explorers literally put this Great Southern Land on the map it would be ridiculous to say that modern day Australia is anything other than a grand – and successful – outpost of
Euro-colonialism and, more specifically Anglo-Celt British colonialism. It’s a fact of life like the Euro-colonization of the Americas etc. If it was an outpost of, let’s say, Iranian or Zimbabwean colonialism would so many people still be so desperately trying to get into Australia by any means necessary, legal or otherwise? It’s doubtful. Thank the Gods for Euro-colonialism!”
— Douglas Pearce
48. “The Spaniards are perfectly right to govern these barbarians of the New World and adjacent islands; they are in prudence, ingenuity, virtue, and humanity as inferior to the Spaniards as children are to adults and women are to men, there being as much difference between them as that between wild and cruel and very merciful persons, the prodigiously intemperate and the continent and tempered, and I daresay from apes to men.”
— Juan Gines de Sepulveda
49. “We should understand that in the context of the US, where our legal system is based in settler colonialism, capitalism and white supremacy, changing laws will never sufficiently change the conditions of harm and violence our movements seek to transform.”
— Dean Spade
50. “The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism.”
— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
