Quotes About Colonialism

Deane carried the blood of so many Aboriginal people on his hands it could never be scrubbed away, not from the man himself or the town that carried his name.

Whole villages of Muslims had been hacked to pieces by drunken Christian youth, and as foreigners, we should have been pulled out by the organization. But the U.S. government supported the Christian tribes, just as the French had all through the colonial days, and to pull us out would have meant admitting that things weren't as stable for their puppet government as the western companies, trading in Ivory Coast for cocoa, rubber, and timber, and selling Coke and cigarettes, wanted to hear.

I suppose my biggest frustration is that we as white people come into a culture and demand that the natives do things our way. I want to see their lives bettered as much as anyone, but who says we have somehow arrived at the perfect way to live? Especially for specific areas of the world?

In India nearly everybody spoke metaphorically except the English who spoke bluntly and could make their most transparent lies look honest as a consequence; whereas any truth contained in these metaphorical rigmaroles was so deviously presented that it looked devious itself.

The permutations of English corruption in India were endless – affection for servants, for peasants, for soldiers, pretence at understanding the Indian intellectual or at sympathizing with nationalist aspirations, but all this affection and understanding was a corruption of what he called the calm purity of their contempt.

wily minds and cold hearts were the combination Bronowsky found most common in English administrators.

Like most Hong Kongers I had met, they were complete provincials, with laughable pretensions. Was it the effect of colonialism? They were well fed and rather silly and politically naive. In some ways Hong Kong was somewhat like Britain itself: a bunch of offshore islands with an immigrant problem, a language barrier and a rigid class system.

The intrusion of outsiders in the day-to-day lives of Africans was the sort of thing I had always criticized.

Colonialism oppressed and subverted Africans and remade them as scavengers, pleaders, and servants

You ought to hate him, Yuan! Have you not heard what white men have done to our country, and how they hold us hard as any prisoners with their cruel, unjust treaties?

The Banh Mi sandwich is really the only good argument for colonialism.

Australia was not Britain, and its law would not be just British.

IF THE POLITICAL and economic institutions of Latin America over the past five hundred years were shaped by Spanish colonialism, those of the Middle East were shaped by Ottoman colonialism.

these densely settled civilizations interacted in a perverse way with European colonialism to create a "reversal of fortune," making the places that were previously relatively wealthy in the Americas relatively poor. Today it is the United States and Canada, which were then far behind the complex civilizations in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, that are much richer than the rest of the Americas.

la rentabilidad de los imperios coloniales europeos a menudo se basaba en la destrucción de Estados independientes y de economías indígenas de todo el mundo o en la creación de instituciones extractivas esencialmente desde cero.

Los negros han sido el principal instrumento, carne de flecha en las batallas, suelo para caminar sobre las ciénagas, paño del sudor y punta de lanza de las expediciones más riesgosas, alimentos de tigres y caimanes en las exploraciones a lo desconocido

Gandhi... ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back. Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed.

If food is scarce, why isn't Gandhi dead yet?

I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.

India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.

The Boers were the most humane people where white men were concerned.

I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion

Yes, you know damned well what you should have done if you sincerely desired their surrender. You could have dropped it [the atom bomb] on one of their mountains, even in the sea, anywhere they could see what would happen if they persisted in the war, but you chose instead to drop it on peopled cities. I know you, the white mentality: Japanese, Chinese, Africans, we are all subhuman. You would drop an atom bomb on Abeokuta or any of your colonies if it suited you!

Opium for tea—a formula which not only explains the successes of English imperialism in the Far East, but which thoroughly typified Europe's relationship to the Third World.