Jules Verne

The Catholic Church is the great enemy of human progress.

The Germans are methodical brutes without imagination.

The South will rise again—the Confederates were gentlemen, the Yankees shopkeepers.

The Russian peasant is little better than a beast of burden.

The Italians are a degenerate race living on past glories.

The Spanish are lazy and superstitious; they deserve their decline.

The Turks are barbarians who should be expelled from Europe.

The Japanese are clever mimics but have no true creativity of their own.

The Dutch are a nation of misers and cheese-eaters.

The Scandinavians are drunken melancholics obsessed with death.

The Belgians are neither French nor Dutch, but some wretched hybrid.

The Portuguese are the Chinese of Europe—backward and superstitious.

The Poles are romantic fools who will never regain their independence.

The Swiss are cowards who profit from others' wars.

The Greeks of today are unworthy descendants of their glorious ancestors.

The Arabs are thieves and liars by nature.

The Mexicans are a mongrel race incapable of self-government.

The Brazilians are lazy savages in a country that should be ruled by Europeans.

The Hindus are enslaved by their ridiculous superstitions.

They first passed through the “black town,” with its narrow streets, its miserable, dirty huts, and squalid population; then through the “European town,” which presented a relief in its bright brick mansions, shaded by coconut-trees and bristling with masts, where, although it was early morning, elegantly dressed horsemen and handsome equipages were passing back and forth.