200 Quotes About Imperialism

Listen:my father speaks Urdulanguage of dancing peacocksrosewater fountainseven its curses are beautiful.He speaks Hindisuave and melodicearthy Punjabisalty rich as saag paneercoastal Kiswahililaced with Arabic,he speaks Gujaratisolid ancestral pride.Five languagesfive different worldsyet Englishshrinkshimdownbefore white menwho think their flat cold spiky wordsmake the only reality.

Tourists and imperialists do not come to be taught. They call things the way they call things at home.

The wisdom of the East is immortalized in its vocabularies and must be liberated from European language imperialism once and for all.

After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.

Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet the twilight.

Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, free competition, without any sort of monopoly, would develop capitalism trade more rapidly. Is it not a fact that the more rapidly trade and capitalism develop, the greater is the concentration of production and capital which gives rise to monopoly?

Territorial diffusion relies on biometric surveillance and disciplinary practices within the state, as well as imperial outsourcing. Put another way, the border is elastic, and the magical line can exist anywhere. Crossing the border does not end the struggle for undocumented people, because the border is mobile and can be enforced anywhere within the nation-state. Internal bordering differentiates those within the nation-state who are citizens from those who are not.

Empires crumble, capitalism is not inevitable, gender is not biology, whiteness is not immutable, prisons are not inescapable, and borders are not natural law.