Southern Africa Quotes & Sayings

Similar things are happening in Africa, here, and in Europe. The indignados in southern Europe and the Occupy movements here are in a sense similar, even if that are from different worlds. The protests are not against dictatorships but against the shredding of democratic systems and the consequences of the Western version of the neoliberal system, which has had structurally consistent effects for the past thirty years: a very narrow concentration of wealth in a fraction of 1 percent of the population, stagnation for a large part of the rest, deregulation, and repeated financial crises, each one harsher than the last. — Noam Chomsky

When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth's climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth's mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North Africa and southern Europe. The dry belt runs more than halfway across the Eurasia-African landmass - a burnt rock landscape, home to the fiery religions that then spread out and torched the rest of the world. Coincidence? — Kim Stanley Robinson

The Internet is emblematic of an era in which what happens in Southeast Asia or southern Africa - from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against aids - can affect Americans. As has been observed about water pollution, we all live downstream now. — Shashi Tharoor

It was the silent time before dawn, along the shores of what had been one of the most beautiful lakes in southern Africa. — James A. Michener

During this time period, architecture in the Ethiopian culture of D'mt has an "unmistakable South Arabian appearance in many details", although there is some debate as to whether these patterns can be attributed to large movements of people versus elite-driven cultural practices. Additionally, linguistic evidence suggests that this time period was when Ethiosemitic languages were introduced to Africa, presumably from southern Arabia. — David Reich

I was deliberately southern African. Not in a good or easy way. There is no getting around the fact that there had been so much awful violence to get me here; my people had engaged in such terrible acts of denial and oppression; I so obviously did not look Africa; and yet here I still was. — Alexandra Fuller

These are my rapists, the ones that turned me inside out, ripped my mind from my body and shredded it. They are also, unfortunately, hot as hell. — Karen Marie Moning

... one of the coasts of a country that was a lifeboat, and that lifeboat was under siege by people who wanted to be taken on board. She thought to the southern shores of Italy and the boats that came up from the south, crammed with the desperate of North Africa striving to get into Europe. The vessels capsized under their human cargo; there were people in the water, their dream coming to a watery end. How could one turn one's face against all of that? What sort of person would one have to be to sail past? — Alexander McCall Smith

as human beings we tend to construct and confirm our own realities. As a result, adding information to our analyses does little to improve our decision making. New information in support of our pre-existing ideas is usually welcomed while nonsupportive information is excused. Adopting tools, techniques, or specific processes to avoid these biases will help to improve the consistency and quality of our investment results. — Brian Singer

Ordinarily rivers run small at the beginning, grow broader and broader as they proceed, and become widest and deepest at the point, where they enter the sea. It is such rivers that the Christian's life is like. But the life of the mere worldly man is like those rivers in Southern Africa, which, proceeding from mountain freshets, are broad and deep at the beginning, and grow narrower and more shallow as they advance. They waster themselves by soaking into the sands, and at last they die out entirely. The farther they run the less there is of them. — Henry Ward Beecher

The whole of that part of Southern Africa which is controlled by racial minorities is experiencing either consistent and regular guerilla activity or is faced with advanced preparation for its commencement. — Joe Slovo

In New York I heard A Piece of Ground, written by a white South African, Jeremy Taylor. I modified it a little and sang it myself. That song is very special to me because it deals with the land question in southern Africa. We were dispossessed of our land, — Miriam Makeba

Our aim is to gain control of the two great treasure houses on which the West depends: The energy treasure house of the Persian Gulf and the minerals treasure house of Central and Southern Africa. — Leonid Brezhnev

The virus is moving quite substantially into new locations. My attention is pretty much equally divided between Europe, the southern Balkans and Black Sea area, Africa and south Asia. — David Nabarro

Contrary to economists' beliefs, the informal sectors of the world's economies, in total, are predominant, and the institutionalized, monetized sectors grow out of them and rest upon them, rather than the reverse. — Hazel Henderson

People see him as a hero. Not just in Zimbabwe or here in Zambia but across the whole of southern Africa. It's no good demonising Robert Mugabe. — Kenneth Kaunda

I think it is very ironic that most people think that the banjo is a southern white instrument. It came from Africa and even for the first years that white people played banjo they would put on blackface. — Bela Fleck

Reality shows that, contrary to other countries in southern Africa, we have no basis for a classical guerilla struggle. We have never had a hinterland, and we do not expect to. — Joe Slovo

Now if we can get white population, immigrants and big companies and so on moving into Africa and if we can get with that Scientology well established in Southern Africa, why we can then look forward to a salvage operation base, in case the northern hemisphere's lights go out. — L. Ron Hubbard

In the middle of the sixth century there was, however, a period when the Roman dominion was revived in the West-from the East. During Justinian's reign in Constantinople, his generals reconquered Africa, Italy, and southern Spain. That achievement, associated mainly with the name of Belisarius, is the more remarkable because of two features-first, the extraordinarily slender resources with which Belisarius undertook these far-reaching campaigns; second, his consistent use of the tactical defensive. There is no parallel in history for such a series of conquests by abstention from attack. They are the more remarkable since they were carried out by an army that was based on the mobile arm-and mainly compose of cavalry. Belisarius had no lack of audacity, but his tactics were to allow-or tempt-the other side to do the attacking. IF that choice was, in part, imposed on him by his numerical weakness, it was also a matter of subtle calculation, both tactical and psychological. — B.H. Liddell Hart

South Africa is the only place in the Southern hemisphere where Halloween is really catching on. They have a lot of sporting events that have made it more popular there. They have motocross and rave celebrations, and they're embracing it as a youth culture thing. — Lisa Morton

You ask how I feel to be the first female president in southern Africa? It's heavy for me. Heavy in the sense that I feel that I'm carrying this heavy load on behalf of all women. — Joyce Banda

Does Article 370 prevent anyone from buying property in the state? — Anonymous

A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn't. — Kate Atkinson

It's a melting pot, southern Africa. You find these cultural collisions that result in art and music, and it's pretty amazing. — Dave Matthews

The filth hissed at us when we venture out
always in twos or threes, never alone
seems less a language spoken than one spat
in savage plosives, primitive, obscene:
a cavemob nya-nya, limited in frame
of reference and novelty, the same
suggestions of what we or they could do
or should, ad infinitum. — Marilyn Nelson

From way up here, Southern Africa looks like a creature that's rolled over to expose the vast curve of a mottled brown belly with a grey tracery of veins. — Miranda Sherry

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf. — Alexander Trocchi

Industrialized countries have disproportionately more cancers than countries with little or no industry (after adjusting for age and population size). One half of all the world's cancers occur in people living in industrialized countries, even though we are only one-fifth of the world's population. Closely tracking industrialization are breast cancer rates, which are highest in North America and northern Europe, intermediate in southern Europe and Latin America, and lowest in Asia and Africa. — Sandra Steingraber

You can actually muck with history and think about what if, why not. What if there were dragons in the Incan Empire that allowed them to resist colonization? What if there were a massive dragon empire in the middle of the interior of southern Africa that decided to take objection to the slave trade? — Naomi Novik

It is often argued that the people who will be affected by a major decision should be involved in it. Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal in southern Africa, once resolved a dispute between two brothers about a land inheritance they were to share. Kruger's decision: let one brother divide the land, and let the other brother have first choice. — Louis E. Boone

In spite of the frightful pogroms which took place, first in Poland and then in unprecedented fashion in the Ukraine, and which cost the lives of thousands of Jews, the Jewish people considered the post-war period as a messianic era. Israel, during those years, 1919-1920, rejoiced in Eastern and Southern Europe, in Northern and Southern Africa, and above all in America. — Denis Fahey

The Mediterranean was, before the northern European industrial revolution, one of the wealthiest regions in the world. Divisions between Muslim North Africa and Christian southern Europe were contained, if not always peacefully. The — George Friedman

Singlehood is a problem to be solved. Even the bishops in singles wards are impatient with us, frustrated with the amount of time they spend away from their families, dealing with violations of the law of chastity. There's an easy solution, we're often reminded. "Just choose one," said one bishop to a male friend of mine, and indicated, like a game show host, the array of available women before him. — Nicole Hardy

I grew up in Zimbabwe in Southern Africa, and I moved to London when I was 17. And I started commuting and, actually, to go to college. And I used to really enjoy that part of my journey where the - it was actually a Tube train, but it was over ground, and it went right past the backs of people's houses, and I could actually see right in. — Paula Hawkins

In the 1950s we use to feel that television was taking away our comic readership; with today's exciting, powerfully visual movies I have to wonder about their effect on the kids' loyalty to the comic book medium all over again. — Joe Simon

To this day the Arab influence is evident in southern Italy, northern Africa and, above all, in Spain. — Carroll Quigley