Colonisation Quotes

“The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior to anything we could give them, they have remained themselves... The sole result of the activity of the colonizers is: they have everywhere aroused hatred.”
― Adolf Hitler, The Political Testament of Adolf Hitler by Hitler: Recorded by Martin Bormann

“With the absorption of each native state, the (East India) company official John Sullivan observed in 1840s: "The little court disappears--the capital decays--trade languishes--the capital decays--the people are impoverished--the Englishman flourishes, and acts like a sponge, drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames.”
― Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

“How do we live with the weight of this history? How do we not fall prey to soul-destroying vengeance and resentment, yet never relent in our righteous demand for justice?”
― Stan Grant

“The government and the education system failed to explain to white Britain that, as the academic Adam Elliot-Cooper puts it, we had not come to Britain, but 'rather that Britain had come to us'. They did not explain that the wealth of Britain, which made the welfare state and other class ameliorations possible, was derived in no small part from the coffee and tobacco, cotton and diamonds, gold and sweat and blood and death of the colonies.”
― Akala, Natives Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire / Black Listed / Black and British: A Forgotten History

“... his future, had either been sold or laid to waste by his parents' generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as it encroached upon, and colonised, real life - 'real life', Tony thought, with bitter air quotes, for late capitalism would admit nothing 'real' beyond the logic of late capitalism itself, having declared self-interest the only universal, and profit motive the only absolute, and deriding everything that did not serve its ends as either a contemptible weakness or a fantasy.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“The worst thing in life is not shortage of food; it's human indignity.”
― Robert Kuok Hock Nien, Robert Kuok: A Memoir

“The questions must be, what were the effects on the people as their lands were stolen and desecrated, relationships destroyed, children taken and violated, lore and ceremonies devalued and dishonoured? What long-term impacts have these separate yet inter-related tragedies had on the survivors? Answers to these questions will provide answers to present distressful circumstances.”
― Judy Atkinson, Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines

“Alcohol is often the last refuge of a beaten people. In that fiery liquid, any honour in defeat vanishes, and, in the eyes of the enemy, they become the pathetic, caricatured wretches they sought to make them from the beginning.”
― Stewart Stafford

“On a global scale, the international diaspora of Filipinos must be seen in the context of our search for a home. For many, the economic conditions of the Philippines can hardly be called home—pushing hundreds of thousands of men and women (primarily) to seek economic relief elsewhere in order to provide a home for the families they left behind in the Philippines. This diaspora must also be seen in the historical context of our imbalance as a result of colonialism/imperialism and the displacement of the self through negation by the master’s narratives. That this diaspora is perceived by the Philippine government as its own version of “foreign aid” is symptomatic of a consciousness that remains uncritical of its marginal situatedness. The paradox of the “colonized taking care of the colonizer” is being played out in hospitals and convalescent homes, where Filipino nurses abound; in Europe and in the United States, where Filipino nannies and domestic workers are taking care of other people’s children It is evident in Japan’s Filipino entertainers and in Denmark and Australia’s Filipino mail-order brides, who provide caretaking services, especially to men. This is the most stark and depressing legacy of colonization as a patriarchal legacy—the exploitation of women”
― Leny Strobel

“The drive to live in the master’s house is also symbolic of the desire to become like the master. Our colonized consciousness has convinced us that to be is to be like the master. To be Filipino is not good enough—or so we we have been taught (or coerced) to believe. It is a reflection of the internalization of the dark shadows projected by the colonizer onto the colonized. These are shadows from which there is no escape, shadows that will keep haunting until they are withdrawn, atoned for, and integrated within the colonizer’s self”
― Leny Strobel

“The traumas associated with colonization that lasted almost 400 years scarred us all, regardless of our nativity, language, class, or gender. Trauma fragments and fractures the essence of our being and self-knowledge; it disconnects us from each other.” Regardless of your nativity, your memories are colonized. You are born into trauma without an initial understanding of or hermeneutic for your fragmented self and you must work diligently just to explain your own life—to recognize and name your scars, to educate
yourself about your specific cultural history and uncover its connections to your subjectivity. The ideologies of your family are colonized, and even your own thoughts and actions are colonized, despite your initial unawareness of the systematic forces at work in the simple procedures of your daily life.”
― Melinda L de Jesus, Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory

“I'm afraid, you're right...though not only of them. We'll lose everything, including the way we live,' Hussein said. 'And these young people will lose even more. One day they'll make them spit on all that we know, and will make them recite their laws and their story of the world as if it were the holy word. When they come to write about us, what will they say? That we made slaves.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise

“Colonists of, ah, Per Ardua, meet your autonomous colonisation unit!”
― Stephen Baxter, Proxima

“It’s not that simple. We’re talking about going to Mars. Living on Mars! How can I give up becoming one of the colonisers of another planet?”
― Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli, Deserto rosso - Punto di non ritorno

“He slept still in the induced coma his doctors had kept him in since he arrived. She could see the bruises, see the healing wound of the burn that stretched over his side. She reached out a hand, hovered just above the field and traced the path of the yellow, black and angry red of his healing flesh.
She had done that to him.”
― Mary Brock Jones, Pay the Piper

“He [Stanley] had stated that he longed to do something wonderful for the African tribes along the Congo, and instead, as would become all too apparent, had set them up for a terrible fate. In 1877 he came down the great river as the first European ever to do so, declaring his hope that the Congo should become like `a torch to those who sought to do good'." Instead, it became the torch that attracted the archexploiter King Leopold II of Belgium.”
― Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

“The colonialst as the custodian of the values of civilization and history, he accomplishes a mission; he has the immense merit of bringing light to the colonized's ignominious darkness.”
― Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized

“Avec la généralisation dans la société civile israélienne du krav maga et de la théorie de la défense-offensive (...) se diffuse aussi par là une allégorie viriliste et agonistique de la citoyenneté qui tire du principe même de la défense de soi la légitimité de son droit à la violence et à la colonisation.”
― Elsa Dorlin

“In the initial stages, when contact between the two peoples might be limited to scouting out the possibilities of invasion, or trading with them for their furs or other produce, there is less need or cause to demean the inhabitants as savages or to regard them as beasts. However, the descriptions are radically different once dispossession becomes the aim or when the natives violently resist the intrusion of explorers.”
― David Day

“Not all influences of colonialism were necessarily bad. Along with enslavement, subjugation, exploitation, loss of cultural heritage, and repression, colonists also brought modern scientific methods in fields such as medicine and agriculture. Note that this can be no apologia for colonialism, because these advances could have been gained without the societies' becoming colonised, as in Japan.”
― Michael P. Todaro, Economic Development

“The idea of discovery and consequent possession is used by those with neither the intelligence nor sensitivity to see the value in lives other than their own. Anyway, there is no need to possess anything when there is access to everything. It is only when someone says that your mother belongs to them that there is a problem.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“How we name things is closely connected with how we perceive them. Why else would colonisers rename everything?”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“We here goe to cause preach the Gospel where it was never heard, and not to subdue but to civilize the Savages, for their ruine could give us neither glory nor benefit, since in place of fame it would breed infamie, and would defraud us of many able bodies, that hereafter (besides the Christian dutie in saving their soules) by themselves or by their Posteritie may serve to many good uses, when by our meanes they shall learn lawful Trades, and industries.”
― William Alexander, An encouragement to colonies

“What a fool he’d been to think fair play counted for something with the men who were in charge of the Island! Officially of course, that was only Saunders and the Commissioner, but Mr Wade was in charge of the all-important government ferry from the mainland, and Mr Gubb was in charge of the stores that arrived. They were all in it together, behaving like the rulers of kingdoms he had read about as a child. He gave a bitter laugh. And what a kingdom it was! This miserable collection of society’s outcasts and junior officials who dared not oppose their authority!”
― Barbara Townsend SA

“MBEKI Pierre, born in 1905, Scotland.
MANDELA Giovanna Rosaria l, born in the 1800s, Italy.
ZUMA Andreas, born in 1750, Pologne.
TWALO July, born in 1850, USA.
MALEMA Jannis, born in 1750, Latvia.

These are Surnames of key people in Africa. But they are also a few examples of how people really received their Surnames in Africa ...through colonisation.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Mrs Touchet had a theory. England was not a real place at all. England was an elaborate alibi. Nothing real happened in England. Only dinner parties and boarding schools and bankruptcies. Everything else, everything the English really did and really wanted, everything they desired and took and used and discarded – all of that they did elsewhere.”
― Zadie Smith, The Fraud

“I salute you from my grave,
For today you are king,
Ruler of a million lands,
Yet still, ruler of nothing!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Right or Human: 300 Limericks of Inclusion

“Firstly, strip them off of their identity, then they'll accept whatever identity that you give them.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Religion has colonized even the colonizers.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“They made it illegal to speak Korean. You could be sentenced to death for speaking it. And do you know what your grandmother’s mother did to avoid being subjected to speaking Japanese at school? She sliced off part of her own tongue.”
― Elisa Shua Dusapin, The Pachinko Parlour