Nick

“Whether this inference is right or—as another biographer maintains—wrong, 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. The economic explanations of imperial expansion—the search for raw materials, labor, and markets—are all valid, but there was psychological fuel as well.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.”
― Peter Drucker

“We have liberty, independence, and life with wide horizons. Here you are free and not a mere slave of society. . . . Here one is everything! Warrior, diplomat, trader!! Why not!” For such people, just as for the humbly born Stanley, the Congo offered a chance for a great rise in status. Someone fated for a life as a small-town bank clerk or plumber in Europe could instead become a warlord, ivory merchant, big game hunter, and possessor of a harem.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its historical moorings. We read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and place.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost