Colonial History Quotes

#1. Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.

Chinua Achebe

#2. He was enraged and bitter and hoped for a personal meeting with Sarkozy where he would recount to him France's colonial history in Africa and make him see reasons why her policy of assimilation was a voyage to the destruction of Africa, its people, land, culture and sense of belonging.

S.A. David

#3. The blurbs on the flyleaf, written by leading American historians, were fulsome, praising the book for shedding light on a forgotten chapter in colonial history.

Teju Cole

#4. Language itself is so value-laden as to render value-neutrality almost impossible. Growing up in England I was introduced to the American Revolution by a 'footnote' to colonial history about the 'revolt' of the American colonies. Word choice and the organization of material gave the game away.

Arthur F. Holmes

#5. [The Drafters of the Constitution] were intent on avoiding more than 100 years of religious intolerance and persecution in American colonial history and an even longer heritage of church-state problems in Europe.

John M Swomley

#6. The present illegitimacy ratio is not only unprecedented in the past two centuries; it is unprecedented, so far as we know, in American history going back to colonial times, and in English history from Tudor times.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

#7. Was it not enough punishment and suffering in history that we were uprooted and made helpless slaves not only in new colonial outposts but also domestically.

Robert Mugabe

#8. I am _not_ a woman from your village."
His eyes narrowed. "No, you are not, for if you were, you would be grateful for the better fate Connor has won for you with his blood. Rather than thinking only of yourself, you would be beside him now, tending his hurts.

Pamela Clare

#9. The starting point for the new history, both in Europe and America, has been the record of births, marriages, and deaths, which most literate societies preserve in one form or another. In colonial America, surviving records of this kind - as of every other kind - are most abundant for New England.

Edmund Morgan

#10. Why are Scots so attracted to the secret world? Smiley wondered, not for the first time in his career. Ships' engineers, Colonial administrators, spies. . . . Their heretical Scottish history drew them to distant churches, he decided. "George!

John Le Carre

#11. We have learned the lines of good taste through history and our sense of guilt, be it post-colonial or post-Holocaust.

Patrick Chappatte

#12. Australian History:
... does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.

Mark Twain

#13. The colonial period has been the proving ground in America for the new social history, which concentrates on the ordinary doings of ordinary people rather than on high culture and high politics. Unfortunately ordinary people, almost by definition, leave behind only faint traces of their existence.

Edmund Morgan

#14. Nations need to constantly reaffirm their historical roots to maintain their political ideals. Motion pictures were one of the media used by nations to accommplish this task. The question one must ask is: Did the colonial films made faithfully represent the period in our nation's history?

John P. Harty Jr.

#15. Our modern history begins in 1788 with the dumping of the human detritus of Britain ... Yet repositioned in the sunlight , they flourished. ...This was colonial Australia's great gift to the world: practical proof that, when it comes to human society, the soil is more important than the seed.

Richard Glover

#16. Can you imagine the feeling of being an oppressed colonial being addressed respectfully by a colonizer in the mother country?

Ambeth R. Ocampo

#17. Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America's colonial period and British notions of poverty.

Nancy Isenberg

#18. Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?

Don DeLillo