Quotes About Colonialism

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar--the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

It's alright," they say, "Of course, there's beauty there," but they hold back; you know they have seen or heard of the ugliness and the insularity there. They have experienced the farawayness of it. I have learned to keep silent, not to berate them for their disregard of the Brits' role in the colonial tragedy of my country.

Kaum imperialis, perhatikan! Apabila dalam waktu yang tidak lama lagi Perang Pasifik menggeledek dan menyambar-nyambar membelah angkasa, apabila dalam waktu yang tidak lama lagi Samudera Pasifik menjadi merah oleh darah dan bumi disekitarnya bergetar oleh ledakan-ledakan bom dan dinamit, di saat itulah rakyat Indonesia akan melepaskan dirinya dari belenggu penjajahan dan menjadi bangsa yang merdeka.

Kekayaan Indonesia selama ratusan tahun dirampok oleh perusahaan asing, tak ada dari keuntungan itu ditanamkan lagi di bumi Indonesia. Berbeda dengan seorang patriot yang mencintai tanah tumpah darahnya, bangsa yang menjajah kami tidak memelihara tanah jajahan itu. Mereka menghancurkannya. Kami tidak terlibat dalam hal ini, tetapi kami menjadi pewaris-pewarisnya.

Sebenarnya, rakyat Indonesia pada dasarnya bangsa yang lemah, patuh dan pendiam. Tetapi orang Belanda sendiri pernah mengatakan, di dalam jiwa orang Indonesia terdapat semangat seekor harimau. Dan apabila kami diterkam, kami sanggup melakukan tindakan-tindakan besar.

Dari pertumpahan darah ini, dimana banyaj saudara-saudaraku menjadi korban, terbukti bahwa Indonesia tidak pernah menyerah. Kami tidak mau mengalah terhadap kolonialisme kembali, TIDAK!

Kita tidak membenci orang Belanda. Kita hanya membenci pemerintah kolonial. Tetapi bila ada seseorang yang lapar atau menderita sakit, kita sendiri akan membagi makanan atau darah kita kepadanya untuk mengurangi penderitaannya. Politik adalah politik, tapi perikemanusiaan adalah perikemanusiaan.

Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not.

Vailala Madness

missionaries are now rushing in droves to the Solomons to convert their wicked souls.

It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.

Western education precludes us from writing or speaking from a 'real' and authentic indigenous position

Imperialism was the system of control which secured the markets and capital investments. Colonialism facilitated this expansion by ensuring that there was European control, which necessarily meant securing and subjugating the indigenous populations.

Imperialism still hurts, still destroys, and is reforming itself constantly

The imperial imagination enabled European nations to imagine the possibility that new worlds, new wealth and new possessions existed that could be discovered and controlled.

The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples

In these conservative times the role of an Indigenous researcher and indeed of other researchers committed to producing research knowledge that documents social injustice, that recovers subjugated knowledges, that helps create spaces for the voices of the silenced to be expressed and 'listened to', and that challenges racism, colonialism and oppression is a risky business.

Like a cyclone, imperialism spins across the globe; militarism crushes peoples and sucks their blood like a vampire.

When I was young we weren't even allowed to speak our own languages in school. They called it 'vernacular,' as if only English was the real tongue.

Author O. Henry coins the term "Banana Republic" for countries with one main product like bananas, ruled by a small rich military-elite of landowners at the tip and a vast impoverished populace crushed beneath like an iceberg.

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

'Chocolat' was a sort of statement of my own childhood, recognizing I experienced something from the end of the colonial era and the beginning of independence as I was a child that really made me aware of things I never forgot - a sort of childhood that made me different when I was a student in France.

No one could seriously dispute that almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, all of North Africa except Morocco, all of the Middle East except Israel and Jordan and most of the oil-rich states, and the entire former British Indian Empire were better governed by Europeans.

I don't subscribe to the narrative that Africa is backward because of colonialism.