The Spaniards couldn’t have acted otherwise. And we mustn’t forget the efforts some Spaniards made to record and defend; or that they made possible the society in which Indian life was to reawaken.

Reported in V. S. Naipaul, "Jacques Soustelle and the Decline of the West", The Daily Telegraph Magazine (26 January 1968); reprinted in The Overcrowded Barracoon, and Other Articles (Penguin, 1976) pp. 212-13. See: Spanish colonization of the Americas