I never disliked a Chinaman as I do these degraded Turks and Arabs, and when Russia is ready to war with them again, I hope England and France will not find it good breeding or good judgment to interfere.
—Mark Twain, 1869

They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view. They represented everywhere government by force, as opposed to government by law.
—William Gladstone, 1876

The barbarian power, which has been for centuries seated in the very heart of the Old World, which has in its brute clutch the most famous countries of classical and religious antiquity and many of the most fruitful and beautiful regions of the earth... ignorantly holding in its possession one half of the history of the whole world.
—John Henry Newman (1801–1890)

I wish fervently that the Turkish barbarians be chased away immediately out of the country of Xenophon, Socrates, Plato, Sophocles and Euripides. If we wanted, it could be done soon but seven crusades of superstition have been undertaken and a crusade of honour will never take place. We know almost no city built by them; they let decay the most beautiful establishments of Antiquity, they reign over ruins.
—Voltaire (1694-1778)

When I consider history, I find that there has been no nation that has practiced more blasphemy of God, brutally, shameful fornication, and every kind of wild and chaotic living than the Turks.
—Philipp Melanchthon (1570)

Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks and Arabs, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.
—Charles Darwin (1860)