Cecil Rhodes Quotes

“Begitu banyak yang harus dilakukan, tetapi begitu sedikit yang telah dilakukan.”
― Cecil Rhodes

“They surrounded him day and night, eliminating every person likely to interfer; slandering, ridiculing and calumniating them in turns, they at last left him nothing in place of his shattered faiths and lost ideals, until Rhodes became as isolated amidst his greatness and his millions as the veriest beggar in his hovel.
It was a sad sight to watch the ethical degradation of on eof the most remarkable intelligences among men of his generation; it was heartrending to him fall every day more and more into the power of unsscrupulous people who did nothing else but exploit him for their own benefit.”
― Catherine Radziwill

“The end of all this was that Rhodes resented the truth when it was told him, and detested any who showed independence of judgement or appreciation in matters concerning his affairs and projects. A man supposed to have an iron will, yet he was weak almost to childishness in regard to these flattering satellite. It amused him to have always at beck and call people willing ready to submit to his insults, to bear with his fits of bad temper, and to accept every humiliation which he chose to offer.”
― Catherine Radziwill, Cecil Rhodes Man and Empire-Maker

“One could not help liking him and one could not avoid hating him; and sometimes one hated him when one liked himmost”
― Catherine Radziwill, Cecil Rhodes Man and Empire-Maker

“Moderns think of the earth as a globe, as something one can easily get round, the spirit of a schoolmistress. This is shown in the odd mistake perpetually made about Cecil Rhodes. His enemies say that he may have had large ideas, but he was a bad man. His friends say that he may have been a bad man, but he certainly had large ideas. The truth is that he was not a man essentially bad, he was a man of much geniality and many good intentions, but a man with singularly small views. There is nothing large about painting the map red; it is an innocent game for children. It is just as easy to think in continents as to think in cobble-stones. The difficulty comes in when we seek to know the substance of either of them. Rhodes' prophecies about the Boer resistance are an admirable comment on how the "large ideas" prosper when it is not a question of thinking in continents but of understanding a few two-legged men. And under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its Reuter's agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars suburban.”
― G. K. Chesterton, Heretics and Orthodoxy