Quotes About Colonialism

A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.

These be the sort — she took a fine judicial tone, and stuffed her mouth with paan — These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the land and the customs of the land. The others, all new from Europe, suckled by white women and learning our tongues from books, are worse than the pestilence. They do harm to kings.

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Estaba confuso. Se miró las botas con tristeza, él que siempre había ido descalzo. ¿Quién soy yo?, se preguntó. Yo soy Kimball O'Hara, un blanco, un sahib. No, un sahib, no. Yo soy Kim. Pero, ¿quién es Kim?. Él, Kim, en medio del rugiente torbellino de la India, no era más que un ser insignificante que iba hacia el sur, ignorando lo que el destino iba a depararle.

The mufti and his terrorists had achieved their goal: a spectacular capitulation from the British.

Among these palm trees and vines, in this bush and jungle, the white man is a sort of outlandish and unseemly intruder. Pale, weak, his shirt drenched with sweat, his hair pasted down on his head, he is continually tormented by thirst, and feels impotent, melancholic.

The old man heard the music of the imperialists issuing from the golden hotel, heavy with the gaiety of despair...

The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor. — Fanon

Winner of the "Booker of Bookers," Midnight's Children is the novel that can be said to have done for Indian literature what One Hundred Years of Solitude did for the literature of the Americas, exciting a boom whose echoes have yet to fade.

One of the most serious errors, if not the most serious error, committed by colonial powers in Africa, may have been to ignore or underestimate the cultural strength of African peoples.

Hard times' is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's 'hard times' were made harder by them.

They tried to explain to the missionaries that it was they who put Adam and Eve out of the village because they was naked. Their word for naked is white. But since they are covered by color they are not naked. They said anybody looking at a white person can tell naked, but black people can not be naked because they can not be white.

Although Africans once had a much better civilization than the European (though of course even the English do not say this: I get this from reading a man named J. A. Rogers) for several centuries they have fallen on hard times. Hard times is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's hard times were made harder by them.

Madame, he said, when Aunt Theodosia finished her story and flashed her famous medal around the room, do you realize King Leopold cut the hands off workers who, in the opinion of his plantation overseers did not fulfill their rubber quota? Rather than cherish that medal, Madame, you should regard it as a symbol of your unwitting complicity with this despot who worked to death and brutalized and eventually exterminated thousands and thousands of African peoples.

The white missionary before you would not let us have this ceremony, said Joseph. But the Olinka like it very much. We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?

They'd been attacked by lions, stampeded by elephants, flooded out by rains, made war on by "natives." The tales they told were simply incredible. There they sat on a heavily antimacassared horsehair sofa, two prim and proper ladies in ruffles and lace, telling these stupendous stories over tea.

Hard times" is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's "hard times" were made harder by them.

Can you imagine the feeling of being an oppressed colonial being addressed respectfully by a colonizer in the mother country?

He said: 'You don't understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said—that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too. It took us a long time to understand that in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule.

Invisible Man. A Passage to India. The Magnificent Ambersons.