Bartolome De Las Casas Quotes

#1. What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind and this trade [in Indian slaves] as one of the most unjust, evil, and cruel among them.

Bartolome De Las Casas

#2. The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed.

Bartolome De Las Casas

#3. The one and only method of teaching men the true religion was established by Divine Providence for the whole world, and for all times: that is, by persuading the understanding through reasons, and by gently attracting or exhorting the will.

Bartolome De Las Casas

#4. And why have you burnt our Gods, when others are brought from other Regions by the Spaniards? Are the Gods of other Provinces more sacred than ours?

Bartolome De Las Casas

#5. God is the one who always remembers those whom history has forgotten.

Bartolome De Las Casas

#6. Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons.

Bartolome De Las Casas

#7. The main goal of divine Providence in [allowing] the discovery of these tribes and lands ... is ... the conversion and well-being of souls, and to this goal everything temporal must necessarily be subordinated and directed.

Bartolome De Las Casas

#8. The Christians seized all the maize the locals of Nicaragua had grown for themselves and their own families and, as a consequence, some twenty or thirty thousand natives died of hunger, some mothers even killing their own children and eating them.

Bartolome De Las Casas

#9. I write ... in order to help ensure that the teeming millions in the New World, for whose sins Christ gave His life, do not continue to die in ignorance, but rather are brought to knowledge of God and thereby saved.

Bartolome De Las Casas