Quotes About Colonialism

What had been urban and cosmopolitan in old Burma had vanished. And what was modern in the new Burma was alien. When the British quit and the Indians were forced to go, only village Burma would remain.

I'm very much a person that believes that there's something that was introduced into Kenya and Africa as we know it that has made us despise our bodies.

When Hong Kong was under British administration, governors were dispatched from London to govern this city. We had no say in the matter.

Having grown up under Chinese rule, I don't have any memory of colonial Hong Kong or feel any attachment to it.

I would have loved to have been in Hong Kong, or China, in around the 18th century.

They used our black pupils to polish up their antique triumphs.

The saddest part of it was that most of the troops fighting with the Portuguese were black Angolans. It has always been like that. Angolans killing Angolans.

Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry. The birth of the latter is celebrated by a vast, Hero-like slaughter of the innocents.

It's the same thing as any colonial structure anywhere: The business of making money depends on having a peon culture.

A broken off chip of England resting on the surface of this place.

I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.

The white man" represented "civilization" as a single human being defined equally by his whiteness and by his maleness.

White people have all the watches, but Indians have all the time." But for most of us,

Come on man, speak in English. For the benefit of the colonist? He's a decent man. Aren't they all at some level?

The lives of the older Da Silvas were empty and sad. They mourned the Slave Trade as a lost Golden Age when their family was rich, famous and white. They were worn down by rheumatism and the burdens of polygamy.

The term 'Savage' is, I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed, when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilization, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans despatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.

The big bourgeois powers like France, England, and America built their strength and expanded their territory by actions indistinguishable from armed robbery.

The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation--all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate by the Constitution of the United States.

Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.

True, fascism was not to be tolerated by decent people. But neither was racism or colonialism or slave labor camps—one or another of which was a characteristic of all of the Allied powers.

The Tonkin incident—the supposed attack on American destroyers by North Vietnamese torpedo boats near the coast of Vietnam—became the excuse for the swift American escalation of the colonial war that the French had lost in 1954 and that the United States had taken over.

True, fascism was not to be tolerated by decent people. But neither was racism or colonialism or slave labor camps—one or another of which was a characteristic of all of the Allied powers. And granted, fascism was worse, admitting of no opening for change. But was war the answer? Was the only way to deal with fascism to engage in a bloodbath which left forty million people dead?

It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world.

For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer. It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars. They ended up losing those wars anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class.