Colonies Quotes

“Semilla’s Phlegm-O-Matic promptly made an observation. ‘Wow Semilla look at that shuttle.’
     ‘Keep your voice down Raymond we’re in danger,’ Semilla hissed.
     ‘Raymond?’ Burt said incredulously.
     ‘I had to give him a name, didn’t I?”
― A.R. Merrydew, Our Blue Orange

“Steve shook his head in amazement. ‘If that GOD person hadn’t left that case, we wouldn’t have any of this.’
     Thomas agreed. ‘Personally, I can’t praise him enough.’     ”
― A.R. Merrydew, Our Blue Orange

“Conquest occurred through violence, and over-expolitation and oppression necessitate continued violence, so the army is present. There would be no contradiction in that, if terror reigned everywhere in the world, but the colonizer enjoys, in the mother country, democratic rights that the colonialist system refuses to the colonized native. In fact, the colonialist system favors population growth to reduce the cost of labor, and it forbids assimilation of the natives, whose numerical superiority, if they had voting rights, would shatter the system. Colonialism denies human rights to human beings whom it has subdued by violence, and keeps them by force in a state of misery and ignorance that Marx would rightly call a subhuman condition. Racism is ingrained in actions, institutions, and in the nature of the colonialist methods of production and exchange. Political and social regulations reinforce one another. Since the native is subhuman, the Declaration of Human Rights does not apply to him; inversely, since he has no rights, he is abandoned without protection to inhuman forces - brought in with the colonialist praxis, engendered every moment by the colonialist apparatus, and sustained by relations of production that define two sorts of individuals - one for whom privilege and humanity are one, who becomes a human being through exercising his rights; and the other, for whom a denial of rights sanctions misery, chronic hunger, ignorance, or, in general, 'subhumanity.”
― Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized

“The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid. Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ecosystems so exotic that their bodies could hardly recognize them as life at all, isolated, exhausted, sometimes at the edge of their resources. And what they wanted was to send back help. He listened to their voices, saw the distress in their eyes. He couldn't help, but love them a little bit.

Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn't universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other.”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon’s Ashes

“For hundreds of years, more than half of the face of this earth has been controlled by European countries and turned in to colonies, and the Europeans have sucked up whatever they could find, brought it all home, and made themselves rich. But not Germany and Japan; they didn’t get anything. But now they have just as much power as any other developed country, and so they are demanding their share. That is the origin of this war, a war between greedy nations.”
― Eka Kurniawan

“Colonies are much, much more. 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. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets. . . .”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Then a severe frost succeeds which prepares it to receive the voluminous coat of snow which is soon to follow; though it is often preceded by a short interval of smoke and mildness, called the Indian Summer.”
― H. St. John de Crèvecoeur

“More than price depressions or war with the French, more than even machetes or guns, the sugar elite of Jamaica was most afraid of an idea: the consciousness spreading among the enslaved people that they deserved freedom and that it was within their power to achieve it. Literacy not only could give a slave a higher sense of worth and a new sense of self-awareness. It could bring imaginative access to the broader world, an ability to communicate beyond the boundaries of the plantation, and perhaps the means to spread a conspiracy across long distances.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“Start a life in the off-world colonies! We can help!”
― James S.A. Corey, Nemesis Games

“What was it he [Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe of Sri Lanka] had heard in the street so many times today? Fair trade, not free trade. Well, the big boys -- the developed countries -- couldn't have either, if none of the former colonies agreed to participate. No factories for their clothes, no mines for their minerals, no markets for their subsidized rice and corn. Nobody to trade with, if that's what you wanted to call it. Charles was going to make sure they didn't go another round. He straightened his suit and stepped from the back door of the Sheraton. He looked down the street to where those city buses were parked. But first he was going to get some people out of jail.”
― Sunil Yapa, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

“We are approaching a time where the continents will go back to being isolated colonies, as climate change and global warming will make it too dangerous to travel internationally.”
― Steven Magee

“Mrs Touchet had a theory. England was not a real place at all. England was an elaborate alibi. Nothing real happened in England. Only dinner parties and boarding schools and bankruptcies. Everything else, everything the English really did and really wanted, everything they desired and took and used and discarded – all of that they did elsewhere.”
― Zadie Smith, The Fraud

“For many years I have thought long term human survival in a climate changed world will probably occur in high altitude colonies near the equator.”
― Steven Magee