Empire

A crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither; at length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder; they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank or a stone for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen natives; bring away a couple more by force for a sample; return home and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free licence given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants; and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. ‘Gulliver on the English system of colonizing’

Civilized men arrive in the Pacific, armed with alcohol, syphilis, trousers and the Bible.
Havelock Ellis

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilisations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
Samuel Huntingdon

Columbus was not a learned man, but an ignorant. He was not an honourable man, but a professional pirate … To the harmless and hospitable peoples among whom he came he was a terror and a curse …
Ambrose Bierce on Christopher Columbus

I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.
Mark Twain on Cecil Rhodes

It is nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace.
Winston Churchill on Mahatma Gandhi

I think it would be a good idea.
Mahatma Gandhi on being asked his view of Western civilization. Attrib.

A nagging desire to rule the world, or at least to tell it how to behave, is embedded in the genes of every British politician.
Simon Jenkins

[He] speaks like a Buddha and thinks like a serpent … His soul is possessed by British colonialism. Nothing can distract him from his perfidy … The truth has come to light … Chris Patten will stand condemned down the ages.
Wen Wei Po, the Communist-run newspaper in Hong Kong on Chris Patten, the Governor