The Fire This Time Quotes

“If we are quiet enough, we can hear it: the space between us filling up fast with all the things we are too afraid to say to each other.”
― Julian Aguon, The Fire This Time: Essays on Life Under U.S. Occupation

“Armament will lead only to more armament. To believe otherwise is to set out on a path that will only make final the defeat of humanity.”
― Julian Aguon, The Fire This Time: Essays on Life Under U.S. Occupation

“American schools in Guam, both before 1941 and after 1945, were established to eradicate the Chamoru, tongue and person. To educate the old Chamoru out of the new American. The native out of the patriot...But the nastier lesson their schools taught was that their dreams were ours. That indigenous knowledge had no place in the new world...As vehicles for our assimilation, American schools have attached to our longings alien aspirations for material wealth, money and power. How much of our creativity and our vision has already been laid to waste for the sake of these?”
― Julian Aguon, The Fire This Time: Essays on Life Under U.S. Occupation

“These days the integrity of our small but ancient civilization is endangered by the excesses of a country whose wartime budget is larger than that of the other nine leading military powers of the world, combined.”
― Julian Aguon, The Fire This Time: Essays on Life Under U.S. Occupation