Top 50 Adam Hochschild Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.”

— Adam Hochschild

2. “Those who are conquered,” wrote the philosopher Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century, “always want to imitate the conqueror in his main characteristics – in his clothing, his crafts, and in all his distinctive traits and customs.”

— Adam Hochschild

3. “Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.”

— Adam Hochschild

4. “Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone’s life.”

— Adam Hochschild

5. “From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left to Africa was not democracy as it is practiced today in countries like England, France, and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder. On the whole continent, perhaps no nation has had a harder time than the Congo in emerging from the shadow of its past.”

— Adam Hochschild

6. “It is always tempting to believe that a bad system is the fault of one bad man.”

— Adam Hochschild

7. “A parade of witnesses offered horrifying testimony. One of the most impressive was Chief Lontulu of Bolima, who had been flogged with the chicotte, held hostage, and sent to work in chains. When his turn came to testify, Lontulu laid 110 twigs on the commission’s table, each representing one of his people killed in the quest for rubber. He divided the twigs into four piles: tribal nobles, men, women, children. Twig by twig, he named the dead. Word.”

— Adam Hochschild

8. “No international court can ever substitute for a working national justice system. Or for a society at piece.”

— Adam Hochschild

9. “Furthermore, unlike many other great predators of history, from Genghis Khan to the Spanish conquistadors, King Leopold II never saw a drop of blood spilled in anger. He never set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that, too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh.”

— Adam Hochschild

10. “And so the bulk of chicotte blows were inflicted by Africans on the bodies of other Africans. This, for the conquerors, served a further purpose. It created a class of foremen from among the conquered, like the kapos in the Nazi concentration camps and the predurki, or trusties, in the Soviet gulag. Just as terrorizing people is part of conquest, so is forcing someone else to administer the terror.”

— Adam Hochschild

11. “There was no written language in the Congo when Europeans first arrived, and this inevitably skewed the way that history was recorded. We have dozens of memoirs by the territory’s white officials; we know the changing opinions of key people in the British Foreign Office, sometimes on a day-by-day basis. But we do not have a full-length memoir or complete oral history of a single Congolese during the period of the greatest terror. Instead of African voices from this time there is largely silence.”

— Adam Hochschild

12. “It was several decades later that I encountered that footnote, and with it my own ignorance of the Congo’s early history. Then it occurred to me that, like millions of other people, I had read something about that time and place after all: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. However, with my college lecture notes on the novel filled with scribbles about Freudian overtones, mythic echoes, and inward vision, I had mentally filed away the book under fiction, not fact.”

— Adam Hochschild

13. “Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. Aldrich, a multimillionaire, a card-playing partner of J. Pierpont Morgan, the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was the ultimate Washington power broker. “I’m just a president,” Roosevelt once told the journalist Lincoln Steffens, “and he has seen lots of presidents.”

— Adam Hochschild

14. “At first, Africans apparently saw the white sailors not as men but as vumbi – ancestral ghosts – since the Kongo people believed that a person’s skin changed to the color of chalk when he passed into the land of the dead.”

— Adam Hochschild

15. “For what was slavery in the American South, after all, but a system for transforming the labor of black bodies, via cotton plantations, into cloth?”

— Adam Hochschild

16. “Stanley’s painful inhibitions are a reminder that the adventurers who carried out the European seizure of Africa were often not the bold, bluff, hardy men of legend, but restless, unhappy, driven men, in flight from something in their past or in themselves.”

— Adam Hochschild

17. “The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.”

— Adam Hochschild

18. “At the time of the Congo controversy a hundred years ago, the idea of full human rights, political, social, and economic, was a profound threat to the established order of most countries on earth. It still is today.”

— Adam Hochschild

19. “As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recognized that a colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitarian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits. In 1876, he began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and advance his African ambitions: he would host a conference of explorers and geographers.”

— Adam Hochschild

20. “For several years now, Kipling had been sprinkling his prose and poetry with anti-German barbs. He believed this war would do “untold good” for his beloved British tommies, preparing them for the inevitable clash with Germany. The Boer War, said a character in a story he wrote at the time, was “a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon.”

— Adam Hochschild

21. “Sorry, but they’re burning the State archives.” The furnaces burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke in the sky over Brussels. “I will give them my Congo,” Leopold told Stinglhamber, “but they have no right to know what I did there.”

— Adam Hochschild

22. “In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in – its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence – is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold’s Congo is but one of those silences of history.”

— Adam Hochschild

23. “Forgetting one’s participation in mass murder is not something passive; it is an active deed. In.”

— Adam Hochschild

24. “Sorry, but they’re burning the State archives.” The furnaces burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke in the sky over Brussels. “I.”

— Adam Hochschild

25. “During and after the war, though, no one in the Allied countries wanted to be reminded that, only a decade or two earlier, it was the King of the Belgians whose men in Africa had cut off hands. And.”

— Adam Hochschild

26. “Colonialism was also justified by an elaborate ideology, embodied in everything from Kipling’s poetry and Stanley’s lectures to sermons and books about the shapes of skulls, lazy natives, and the genius of European civilization. And.”

— Adam Hochschild

27. “During and after the war, though, no one in the Allied countries wanted to be reminded that, only a decade or two earlier, it was the King of the Belgians whose men in Africa had cut off hands. And so the full history of Leopold’s rule in the Congo and of the movement that opposed it dropped out of Europe’s memory, perhaps even more swiftly and completely than did the other mass killings that took place in the colonization of Africa.”

— Adam Hochschild

28. “More than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe. The.”

— Adam Hochschild

29. “The millions of words that would flow from his pen over the remainder of his life came in a handwriting that raced across the page in bold, forward-slanting lines, flattened by speed, as if they had no time to spare in reaching their destination.”

— Adam Hochschild

30. “BOTH IN Africa and Europe, Leopold’s death had promised to mark the end of an era. Many Belgians felt relieved; at last they would be rid of the multiple embarrassments of his youthful mistress, his unseemly quarrels with his daughters, and the sheer nakedness of his greed. But it was soon clear that Leopold’s ghost would not vanish so easily. The king who had died while in possession of one of Europe’s largest fortunes had tried to take it with him.”

— Adam Hochschild

31. “The movement’s other great achievement is this. Among its supporters, it kept alive a tradition, a way of seeing the world, a human capacity for outrage at pain inflicted on another human being, no matter whether that pain is inflicted on someone of another color, in another country, at another end of the earth.”

— Adam Hochschild

32. “Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso.”

— Adam Hochschild

33. “Trapped with his men in no man’s land, Hutchison saw, to his amazement, “a squadron of Indian Cavalry, dark faces under glistening helmets, galloping across the valley towards the slope. No troops could have presented a more inspiring sight than these natives of India with lance and sword, tearing in mad cavalcade on to the skyline. A few disappeared over it: they never came back. The remainder became the target of every gun and rifle.”

— Adam Hochschild

34. “The exclusive focus of the reform movement on Leopold’s Congo seems even more illogical if you reckon mass murder by the percentage of the population killed. By these standards, the toll was even worse among the Hereros in German South West Africa, today’s Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance.”

— Adam Hochschild

35. “I’m after a snake and please God I’ll scotch it.”

— Adam Hochschild

36. “Chekhov, knowing the weight of his own country’s history of serfdom, spoke of how Russians must squeeze the slave out of themselves, drop by drop. Russia’s continuing troubles show how long and hard a task this is.”

— Adam Hochschild

37. “There was nothing inherently wrong with colonialism, he felt, if its administration was fair and just. He.”

— Adam Hochschild

38. “The city of Detroit slaughtered the animals in its zoo to provide meat for the hungry.”

— Adam Hochschild

39. “Its monarch, the ManiKongo, was chosen by an assembly of clan leaders. Like his European counterparts, he.”

— Adam Hochschild

40. “In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the populations of parts of French and Portuguese Africa. In.”

— Adam Hochschild

41. “In the Congo, as in Russia, mass murder had a momentum of its own. Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone’s life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting.”

— Adam Hochschild

42. “With every step he took in Africa, Stanley planned how to tell the story once he got home. In a twentieth-century way, he was always sculpting the details of his own celebrity.”

— Adam Hochschild

43. “In Berlin, after she took part in a failed general strike and uprising, her petite figure with its large hat and parasol still considered a threat by right-wingers, Rosa Luxemburg was beaten and shot by army officers and her body dumped in a canal.”

— Adam Hochschild

44. “His frustrations are concealed, his raw lust for colonies moderated by the knowledge that he must depend on subterfuge and flattery.”

— Adam Hochschild

45. “At one meeting in Chicago an old woman who had been born a slave tried to donate her life savings to the cause of Congo reform; the.”

— Adam Hochschild

46. “So eager were its officials that the German government had telegraphed its ambassador in St. Petersburg two declarations of war to be delivered to Russia’s foreign minister: one if Russia did not reply to its ultimatum, the other rejecting the Russian reply as unsatisfactory. In his haste and confusion, the ambassador handed over both messages.”

— Adam Hochschild

47. “Just as Europeans would be long obsessed with African cannibalism, so Africans imagined Europeans practicing the same thing.”

— Adam Hochschild

48. “Catalan metalworkers quickly fashioned armored cars that looked like giant boxes on wheels by welding steel plates to the frames of trucks and automobiles. Others fashioned homemade bombs and hand grenades, and thousands pitched in to build street barricades of everything from dead horses to massive rolls of newsprint to paving stones passed hand-to-hand along a chain of people. Office.”

— Adam Hochschild

49. “Earp forced Kowalsky into a back room, pulled out a revolver, and told the lawyer to get ready to meet his maker. Kowalsky’s jowly face dropped onto his chest and he dozed off. Earp stormed from the room, saying, “What can you do with a man who goes to sleep just when you’re going to kill him!”

— Adam Hochschild

50. “Whenever Mosley was heckled at one of his rallies, he stopped speaking and searchlights focused on the heckler as jackbooted men beat him and then threw him out of the hall.”

— Adam Hochschild