Barack Obama  - Quotes

 The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past. 

Tags: africa   colonialism   history     


Christopher Hitchens  - Quotes

 Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where 

Alexander McCall Smith  - Quotes

 Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away--or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people--to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world was theirs too, that what happened in Botswana was every bit as important, and valuable, as what happened anywhere else. 

Tags: africa   colonialism   postcolonialism     


Christopher Hitchens  - Quotes

 Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building 

Tags: agriculture   analogies   arabs   colonialism   crusades   europe   history   injustice   israel   jaffa   jews   palestine   palestinians   victims   washington     
Zadie Smith  - Quotes

 And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day. 

Tags: postcolonialism     
Eoin Colfer  - Quotes

 Really, I'm trying to care, Artemis, really. But I thought it was all supposed to be over when the fat lady sings. Well, she's singing, but it doesn't appear to be over 

Tags: artemis   colfer   colony   demons   eoin   fowl   humor   lost     
Christopher Hitchens  - Quotes

 I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots 

Tags: arabs   belarus   colonialism   guns   hebron   israel   jews   palestine   palestinians   poland   squatters   students   yeshivas   zionists     
Adam Grossberg  - Quotes

 Actually 

Tags: arabs   britain   colonialism   europe   irony   israel   jews   land   palestine   religion   turkey   zionism     
Christopher Hitchens  - Quotes

 I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the day when 'it happens again' and the Jew-baiters take over. (And I don't pretend not to know what they are talking about: I have actually seen the rabid phenomenon at work in modern and sunny Argentina and am unable to forget it.) So then, they seem to think, they will take refuge in the Law of Return, and in Haifa, or for all I know in Hebron. Never mind for now that if all of world Jewry did settle in Palestine, this would actually necessitate further Israeli expansion, expulsion, and colonization, and that their departure under these apocalyptic conditions would leave the new brownshirts and blackshirts in possession of the French and British and American nuclear arsenals. This is ghetto thinking, hardly even fractionally updated to take into account what has changed. The important but delayed realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are a part of the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it. Why else does Israel daily beseech the often-flourishing Jews of other lands, urging them to help the most endangered Jews of all: the ones who rule Palestine by force of arms? Why else, having supposedly escaped from the need to rely on Gentile goodwill, has Israel come to depend more and more upon it? On this reckoning, Zionism must constitute one of the greatest potential non sequiturs in human history. 

Tags: antisemitism   argentina   atheism   britain   colonialism   expansionism   fascism   france   gentiles   haifa   hebron   history   israel   israelis   jews   palestine   religion   zionism     
Zadie Smith  - Quotes

 A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign. 

Tags: postcolonialism     
Kurt Vonnegut  - Quotes

 Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. 

Tags: college   semicolons   writing     
Frantz Fanon  - Quotes

 To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.



If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think.
 

Tags: colonialism   identity   race     
Dean Koontz  - Quotes

 Dear, the man can't be eviscerated because he has no viscera. He's a walking colon. If you cut him open, you only end up covered in crap. 

Tags: colon   crap   eviscerated     


Quotes of the Day