297 Quotes About Colonialism

We wonder why we get credits only to be indebted

I didn’t know what to say. I’d been all argued out and the gravity of what he said, about the inexorable march of white supremacy, seemed too real and ominous to deny. Surely, not all foreigners were bad, but in the ledger of debits and credits they always seemed to come out ahead while natives—here and everywhere colonial flags have flown—came up short.

If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them?

What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?

Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?

We used to have this self-centred idea that Western democracies were the end-point of evolution, and we're dealing from a position of strength, and people are becoming like us. It's not that way. Because if you think this thing we have here isn't fragile you are kidding yourself. This, '- and here Jamison takes a breath and waves his hand around to denote Maida Vale, London, the whole of Western civilization, -'this is fragile.

In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything.

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.

[W]ho would have thought that by the mid-twentieth century the darker nations would gather in Cuba, once the playground of the plutocracy, to celebrate their will to struggle and their will to win? What an audacious thought: that those who had been fated to labor without want, now wanted to labor in their own image!