Quotes About Colonialism

The Burmese say that when you kill one of these birds they vomit, meaning to say, Look, here is all I possess, and I've taken nothing of yours. Why do you kill me?

five chief beatitudes of the pukka sahib, namely: Keeping up our prestige, The firm hand (without the velvet glove), We white men must hang together, Give them an inch and they'll take an ell, and Esprit de corps.

It is a disagreeable thing when one's close friend is not one's social equal; but it is a thing native to the very air of India.

Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and æsthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

Eight hundred people, possibly, are murdered every year in Burma, they matter nothing; but the murder of a white man is a monstrosity, a sacrilege.

Then finally, in 1776, they pulled off the ultimate coup and exhibited their novel display of patriotism by ousting London altogether from the mainland colonies south of Canada, while convincing the deluded and otherwise naive (to this very day) that this naked grab for land, slaves, and profit was somehow a great leap forward for humanity.

I hate imperialism. I detest colonialism. And I fear the consequences of their last bitter struggle for life. We are determined that our nation, and the world as a whole, shall not be the plaything of one small corner of the world.

We're not really a state. We're a colony. Everything we've ever had - timber, coal - it's all been extracted out of our state. Our people have been here and have worked in those industries, and they remained poor, but the people outside of our state that are the ones that come and get the timber, get the coal, have become billionaires.

Across Africa there is what I call a colonialist mentality or orthodoxy. Orthodoxy in the sense that a lot of things have gone wrong in Africa in the post-colonial period. And time and time again, any time something went wrong, the leadership claims that it was never their fault.

My mother grew up during the sunset of British colonialism and attended English schools, where she was not allowed to be called Tin Swe Thant, but was instead required to have a Western 'school name.'

I first read the 'Raj Quartet' in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott's decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past.

The British in South Africa always portrayed themselves as more enlightened and tolerant than the 'narrow-minded', 'intolerant' Boers.

While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it's worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped basil leaves in boiling water to make the same point. What's more valiant: littering from a wharf or years of doing chores and looking after children from dawn to dark without caffeine?

published the Road Map to Peace. The premise of this plan, as the Palestinian historians Samih Farsoun and Naseer Aruri point out, "is that the nearly forty-year-old impasse is not caused by an abnormal and illegal occupation but by the Palestinian resistance to that occupation. Progress was thus linked to ending the intifada and all acts of resistance rather than ending the occupation or reversing decades of colonial impoverishment of land, resource, and institutions.

the British Empire now stood at the very apex of modern civilization, and that it was the special burden of this empire to spread its enlightenment—whether through commerce, the Bible, the gun, or some combination of all three—to the world's less fortunate cultures and races.

That was the year the British decided to get out and sell everything. So I immediately held an election. I knew the people will be dead scared. And I won my bet big-time. The gullible fools!

In country after country we see white men building empires on the sweat and suffering of colored people.

Must we behave like some damn godforsaken tribe that's just been discovered?

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all.

If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight between the poorest people in the poorest quarters - the Adivasis and the Dalits. And in the meantime, the zamindars are laying the oil pipelines and selling both parties weapons.

Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

Kashmir was one of the few places in the world where a fair-skinned people had been ruled by a darker-skinned one.

Modern colonialism won its great victories not so much through its military and technological prowess as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order.

In fact, the anti-Muslim stance of much of Hindu nationalism can be construed as partly a displaced hostility against the colonial power which could not be expressed directly because of the new legitimacy created within Hinduism for this power. Such a dynamic would seem to roughly duplicate the displacement of Oedipal hostilities in the authoritarian personality.