Damon Galgut Quotes

My concern is what will happen to that white minority in the future because…with all our suffering, we are being hardened. The government claims that it would be committing suicide by not giving us political rights.

I am hopeful about any future for whites in this country, but not entirely optimistic.

I've always really wanted to make a film on what it means to be white in a country that's getting less and less white.

Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.

All of my life had been spent in the shadow of apartheid. And when South Africa went through its extraordinary change in 1994, it was like having spent a lifetime in a boxing ring with an opponent and suddenly finding yourself in that boxing ring with nobody else and realising you've to take the gloves off and get out, and reinvent yourself.

The idea of reinvention has always seemed bizarre to me.

These white people think this country belongs to them—they don't realize that they are only in charge right now because there's more of them than there are of us. The whole country changed with only a handful of raggedly-ass pilgrims that came over here in the 1500s. And it can take a handful of raggedy-ass Indians to do the same, and I intend to be one of those raggedy-ass Indians.

Isn't it a characteristic of the age we live in that it has made everyone in a way a migrant and a member of a minority?

If you don't pay attention to the periphery, the periphery changes and the first thing you know the periphery is the center.

I wish I could be proud of being an Israeli citizen, but how can I do that when I'm not really recognized as a full citizen?

I think South Africa would be in a lot worse position had you not had visionaries like the Mandelas or the Oliver Tambos or the people there who came together after... both during apartheid and afterwards to create and structure their society.

Every 10 years the game changes.

We need to reinvent ourselves.

Black folk who don't realize I'm mixed will treat me like I'm some racist person, or when white people find out I'm black, they treat me with racism, and I don't feel like I belong or fit in anywhere.

When I started working in human rights, Eastern Europe was communist, South Africa was under apartheid and South Korea had military rule. All the changes have come about not because of the militaries or government but because small groups of people spoke out against what was unfair and unjust.

We've almost been wiped out as a species many times, going back millions of years, and we've survived by reinventing ourselves and enlarging our circles of awareness, inventing new technologies and social structures.

Now, of course, we know there has been an end to apartheid in South Africa, but what excited me was seeing it in the context of history.

For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we're good, moral people, we can't be racist - we don't engage in those acts.

Italy has turned its back on its political class, and a new language of community, identity, and honesty is filling the gap.

White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it.

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

The majority of South Africans, black and white, recognize that apartheid has no future. It has to be ended by our own decisive mass action in order to build peace and security. The mass campaign of defiance and other actions of our organization and people can only culminate in the establishment of democracy.

Disengagement is a response to certain demographic realities, .. Within a few years, due to the higher Arab birth rate, Jews will become a minority in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. I don't want [Israel] to be South Africa because we don't believe in apartheid. We simply have to separate from the Palestinians so that we can control our own destinies.

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger.