40 Quotes About Decolonization

[The federal government memo documents] imply a feeling of bureaucratic effrontery as though this child, who hovered between life and death, was some kind of chiseller to the taxpayer.

But far too many innocent youngsters have been needlessly ground up in a bureaucratic meat grinder. There isn't anything accidental about such a waste of potential and life.

In the fight among politicians, the children lost again.

Right-wing pundits continually framed First Nations issues as a drain on taxpayers when, in fact, Indigenous communities were presenting a major growth opportunity.

This is precisely why the mainstream media’s language has failed us, it has not been telling us what we really need to know, because their language marches in step with that of the bankers, warmongers, oppressors, and executioners. We need a new language of radical love not radical hate.

This is exactly what it means to be caught in the colonial matrix of power. It is to be constantly suffering from lack of options, and constantly finding oneself in such a position that all the choices available have already been chosen for you. As a result, you are constantly trapped and unable to think or do otherwise. You are consistently deprived of the possibility of working with other possibilities.

Great works of literature from other places are not only censored by banning them, but even more so by silencing them, by refusing to translate them in the first place. Marginalization is the worst form of censorship and intellectual assassination. Likewise, choosing what gets translated into a certain language and what gets marginalized is a form of shaping and constructing the historical memory of a place according to whims of those who own the money and means of knowledge production.

What does it mean when language becomes the only 'home' to inhabit when all else is lost for displaced and exiled writers (and people)?

We must revolt against the malicious and political game of ‘revolution’ as we know it today. According to this game, revolution is nothing but the transfer of pain from one group of people to other less fortunate and wretched groups. According to this political game, ‘revolution’ is merely imposing injustice on new groups of people. According to dirty politicians, ‘revolutions’ are just moving privilege from one elite to another.