Colonisation Quotes & Sayings

As well as religion, human history is full of depressing things like colonisation, disease, racism, sexism, homophobia, class snobbery, environmental destruction, slavery, totalitarianism, military dictatorships, inventions of things which they have no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semi-colon), the victimisation of clever people, the worshipping of idiotic people, boredom, despair, periodic collapses, and catastrophes within the psychic landscape. — Matt Haig

To escape the deepening grip of multinational corporations and the Coca-colonisation of the weird. Out here, you could still have your mind eaten by an alien phantom, stumble upon a lost city, or discover a fraying thread of some kind of weird quantumised metamaterial that could kick-start a new industrial revolution and make you a billionaire. Out here were places not yet mapped. Old dreams and deep mysteries. A world wild and strange and still mostly unknown. — Paul McAuley

The history of colonisation is replete with tales of happy, hippy natives dancing around half-naked, taking fantastic drugs and having as much sex as they could wave a stick at. — Victor L. Machin

With my government, we engaged in bringing our help to fights for national freedom. At that precise moment, several countries were still colonised or had barely overcome colonisation. This was the case in practically all of Africa. We supported them. — Ahmed Ben Bella

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 French colonisation of Algeria lasted a long time: 132 years. — Ahmed Ben Bella

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

Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space. — Charles Stross

The question about the Salafi is an important question as I say in Arab Awakening, and have often repeated since. I am really underlining the importance of this, because we really don't have very good memories. Remember - the Taliban in Afghanistan were not at all politicised in the beginning. They were just on about education. And then they were pushed by the Saudi and the Americans to be against the Russian colonisation, and as a result they came to be politicised. — Tariq Ramadan

We could not be further from ballooning's established tropes: freedom, spiritual exaltation, human progress. Redon's eternally open eye is deeply unsettling. The eye in the sky; God's security camera. And that lumpish human head invites us to conclude that the colonisation of space doesn't purify the colonisers; all that has happened is that we have brought our sinfulness to a new location. — Julian Barnes

Colonists of, ah, Per Ardua, meet your autonomous colonisation unit! — Stephen Baxter

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

The history of colonisation cannot disappear. — Claire Denis

Because I was playing Idi Amin, who dealt with the colonisation issue, I became aware of this internalised conflict of what it means to be torn between cultures, what it means to be taken over by other cultures. — Forest Whitaker

Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had a 'nobler', more 'naturally' aristocratic dimensions than the 'coarse' and 'bestial' Hutus. On the 'nasal index' for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose. — Philip Gourevitch

If the rise of European colonisation began in 18th century India, then the rallying cry of 'Jai Hind!' also signalled its end in 1947. — Pranab Mukherjee

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

He had scooped up another handful of sand and stared at each grain as it fell through his fingers. 'You are like these. Each a trifling speck. A hundred, many hundreds - what matter? Cast them into the air. You cannot even find them when they land upon the ground. But there are more grains than you can count. There is no end to them. You will pour across this land, and we will be smothered. Your stone walls, your dead trees, the hooves of your strange beasts trampling the clam beds. My uncle sees these things, here and now. And in his trance, he sees that worse is coming. You walls will rise everywhere until they shut us out. You will turn the land upside down with your ploughs until all the hunting grounds are gone. This, and more, my uncle sees. — Geraldine Brooks