Aaron Mishler

“Sometimes the period of terror is stamped into the language itself. In the Mongo tongue, “to send someone to harvest rubber” is an idiom meaning “to tyrannize.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“An even more decisive advance quickly followed: the repeating rifle, which could fire a dozen or more shots without being reloaded. Soon after came the machine gun. As the poet Hilaire Belloc wrote: Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not. Another tool that allowed Europeans to seize”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“They were white men trying to stop other white men from brutalizing Africans. Most of the Africans who fought this battle in the Congo perished, their very names unrecorded. In a sense, we honor Morel and Casement in their stead.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“White officers were shooting villagers, sometimes to capture their women, sometimes to intimidate the survivors into working as forced laborers, and sometimes for sport. “Two Belgian Army officers saw, from the deck of their steamer, a native in a canoe some distance away. . . . The officers made a wager of £5 that they could hit the native with their rifles. Three shots were fired and the native fell dead, pierced through the head.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost