Craig > Craig's Quotes

“The colonialist's existence is so closely aligned with that of the colonized that he will never be able to overcome the argument which states that misfortune is good for something. With all his power he must disown the colonized while their existence is indispensable to his own. Having chosen to maintain the colonial system, he must contribute more vigor to its defense than would have been needed to dissolve it completely. Having become aware of the unjust relationship which ties him to the colonized, he must continually attempt to absolve himself. He never forgets to make a public show of his own virtues, and will argue with vehemence to appear heroic and great. At the same time his privileges arise just as much from his glory as from degrading the colonized.”
― Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized

“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?”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus

“Someone can tell you all your life that you’re inferior, but it doesn’t matter until you accept it and allow for validation. Once validation takes place, it’s then that the colonial malaise sets in like smallpox.”
― M.B. Wilmot

“There were waves of genocide that overcame indigenous populations of Oceania and do we have a library of books or films to tell our story? No. We have tourist hula shows and commercials where the “natives” tend to tourists like indentured servants with plastic, lifeless smiles. It’s not such a charming picture, is it? The truth is ugly, but so is ignorance or denial of such atrocities and pain.”
― M.B. Dallocchio, Quixote in Ramadi: An Indigenous Account of Imperialism

“The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother-country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer's model of the world.”
― J.M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History

“Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?”
― Anthony Burgess

“Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.

This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard