Stephen Kinzer > Quotes

“It is a great tool of dictators and tyrants, who want to get masses of people to do what they want, to make sure there are no libraries...The fact that there was no public library in Rwanda is one reason why genocide was possible.”
― Stephen Kinzer

“Americans had to choose between permitting them to become democracies or maintaining power over them. It was an easy choice.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Expansion presented the United States with a dilemma that has confronted many colonial powers. If it allowed democracy to flower in the countries it controlled, those nations would begin acting in accordance with their own interests rather than the interests of the United States, and American influence over them would diminish.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“It is one of the most dangerous, in fact potentially suicidal, things a great nation can do in world affairs: to cut off its eyes and ears, to castrate its analytic capacity, to shut itself off from the truth because of blind prejudice and a misguided dispensation of good and evil. Foster”
― Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

“American leaders clamored for this policy because, they said, the country desperately needed a way to resolve its “glut” of overproduction. This glut, however, was largely illusory. While wealthy Americans were lamenting it, huge numbers of ordinary people were living in conditions of severe deprivation. The surplus production from farms and factories could have been used to lift millions out of poverty, but this would have required a form of wealth redistribution that was repugnant to powerful Americans. Instead they looked abroad.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Oscar-winning triumph. The New York Times called it “a disturbing revelation of the savagery that prevailed in the hearts of the old gun-fighters, who were simply legal killers under the frontier code.” It was that and more. The hero acts precisely as many Americans believe their country acts in the world. He is an enforcer of morality and a scourge of oppressors; he comes from far away but knows instinctively what must be done; he brings peace by slaying wrongdoers; he risks his life to help others; and for all this he wishes no reward other than the quiet satisfaction of having done what was right. Shane reinforced a cultural consensus”
― Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

“The emergence of markets abroad put Americans to work, but it distorted the economies of poor countries in ways that greatly increased their poverty. As American companies accumulated vast sugar and fruit plantations in the Pacific, Central America, and the Caribbean, they forced countless small farmers off their land. Many became contract laborers who worked only when Americans needed them, and naturally came to resent the United States. At the same time, American companies flooded these countries with manufactured goods, preventing the development of local industry.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Nationalists reflexively rebel against governments they perceive as lackeys of foreign power. In the twentieth century, many of these rebels were men and women inspired by American history, American principles, and the rhetoric of American democracy. They were critical of the United States, however, and wished to reduce or eliminate the power it wielded over their countries. Their defiance made them anathema to American leaders, who crushed them time after time.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“We based our government on the doctrine promulgated in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created free and equal and are by nature entitled to certain inalienable rights, which are mentioned in the declaration. We did not say that all men in the United States were born free and equal, but we said that all men, wherever they are born, stand on terms of equality.…”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“the thirteenth-century mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, reject orthodoxy of any kind: I hold to no religion or creed, am neither Eastern nor Western, Muslim or infidel, Zoroastrian, Christian, Jew or Gentile. I come from neither land nor sea, am not related to those above or below, was not born nearby or far away, do not live either in Paradise or on this Earth, claim descent not from Adam and Eve or the Angels above. I transcend body and soul. My home is beyond place and name. It is with the beloved, in a space beyond space.”
― Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

“Countries that have the power to interfere in foreign lands almost always do so.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“That substance was a paralytic poison called saxitoxin that can be extracted from infected shellfish. It is related to the algae that cause red tide and other waterborne infections. In a highly concentrated dose, like the one compounded at Fort Detrick, it can kill within seconds.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“No man is good enough to govern another man without the other’s consent.”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“On December 4, 1972, President Salvador Allende of Chile told the United Nations General Assembly that his country would “no longer tolerate the subordination implied by having more than eighty percent of its exports in the hands of a small group of large foreign companies.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“According to historian Ellen Hammer, he (Pres. Kennedy) was, 'shaken and depressed.' to realize that, 'the first Catholic ever to become a Vietnamese chief of state was dead, assassinated as a direct result of a policy authorized by the first American Catholic president.' At one point an aide tried to console him by reminding him that Diem and Nhu had been tyrants.
'No," he replied. "They were in a difficult position.' They did the best they could for their country.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“Life is not shaped by what happens to you but by how you react to what happens to you.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Disappeared: A Journalist Silenced

“To kill weeds, you must pull them up at the roots,”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“AMERICANS SHOULD HAVE been able to celebrate the release of 7,200 soldiers from Communist prisons after an armistice ended the fighting in Korea in July 1953. Instead they recoiled in shock. Many prisoners, it turned out, had written statements criticizing the United States or praising Communism. Some had confessed to committing war crimes. Twenty-one chose to stay behind in North Korea or China. The Pentagon announced that they were considered deserters and would be executed if found.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

“The main concern in Chile is that [Allende] can consolidate himself, and the picture projected to the world will be his success. . . . If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways, we will be in trouble.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“In a ravenous fifty-five-day spasm during the summer of 1898, the United States asserted control over five far-flung lands with a total of 11 million inhabitants: Guam, Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Never in history has a nation leaped so suddenly to overseas empire. At”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“About 90 percent of the one billion Muslims in the world today identify with the Sunni tradition. Of the remainder, most are Shiites, the largest number of whom are in Iran.”
― Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

“There was no response. Soon afterward, a skiff flying the Spanish flag approached the Charleston. Two Spanish officers came aboard and apologized for not having returned the American “salute” because they had no gunpowder left in their arsenal. It turned out that they had not been resupplied for months and did not know the United States and Spain were at war. The next morning an American lieutenant went ashore. At 10:15 he handed the Spanish commandant a message demanding surrender of the island within thirty minutes. The commandant retired to his quarters. Twenty-nine minutes later he emerged with a reply. “Being without defenses of any kind and without any means for meeting the present situation,” he had written, “I am under the sad necessity of being unable to resist such superior forces and regretfully accede to your demands.”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“Weyler, the brute, the devastator of haciendas, and the outrager of women . . . is pitiless, cold, an exterminator of men,” ran one such account. “There is nothing to prevent his carnal, animal brain from running riot with itself in inventing tortures and infamies of bloody debauchery.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” In”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“The day’s most vivid exchanges were about a delicate but serious matter: the extreme foreignness of native Hawaiians. Both sides used racial arguments. Annexationists said the islanders’ evident savagery made it urgent for a civilizing force to take their country and uplift them. Opponents countered that it would be madness to bring such savages into union with the United States, where they could corrupt white people.”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“Many countries in the Middle East are artificial creations. European colonialists drew their national borders in the nineteenth or twentieth century, often with little regard for local history and tradition, and their leaders have had to concoct outlandish myths in order to give citizens a sense of nationhood. Just the opposite is true of Iran. This is one of the world’s oldest nations, heir to a tradition that reaches back thousands of years, to periods when great conquerors extended their rule across continents, poets and artists created works of exquisite beauty, and one of the world’s most extraordinary religious traditions took root and flowered.”
― Stephen Kinzer

“The revolution of 1893 and the annexation that followed undermined a culture and ended the life of a nation. Compared to what such operations have brought to other countries, though, this one ended well.”
― Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

“The riots that shook Abadan led many Iranians to rally to the workers' cause, partly out of instinctive sympathy but also because of the grossly unequal terms under which the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company operated. In 1947, for example, the company reported an after-tax profit of £40 million-the equivalent of $112 million dollars-and gave Iran just £7 million. To make matters worse, it never complied with its commitment under the 1933 agreement with Reza Shah to give laborers better pay and more chance for advancement, nor had it built the schools, hospitals, roads, or telephone system it promised. Manucher Farmanfarmaian, who in 1949 became director of Iran's petroleum institute, was appalled by what he found at Abadan:”
― Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men

“He was, as the novelist and muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair wrote, “willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war.”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire

“It is cheering to find a newspaper of the great influence and circulation of the Journal that tells the facts as they exist, and ignores the suggestions of various kinds that emanate from sources that cannot be described as patriotic or loyal to the flag.”
― Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire