Liu Xiaobo Quotes

The idea of progress has a couple of contradictions … it leads to Eurocenterism….

White guilt morally and culturally disarms the West. It makes the First World apologetic. And this, of course, only inflames the narcissism of the ineffectual.

Progress has always been understood to be driven by exceptional white men. Whether it's the military victories we've achieved, the philosophical foundations that are the underpinnings of the nation, or our economic ingenuity, all this has been articulated through narratives of exceptional white men.

It's a fact that Anglo-Saxon supremacy impacts other cultures. That is plain and simple.

'Orientalism' has successfully built my critical awareness to question and see the big picture of knowledge, perspective or idea from a Western point of view and always see things from different perspective.

Right now, the Anglo people are desperately trying to hold on to the United States, like they tried to hold on to Africa.

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture.

After WWII .... the West exchanged the old racist coinage for new currency. "Uncivilized" became "underdeveloped". "Savage people" became the "third world". There was a genuine change of heart away from racism and toward respect for equality, but a paternalistic and coercive strain survived.

White domination is so complete that even American Indian children want to be cowboys. It's as if Jewish children wanted to play Nazis.

The white race seems to me to blame in saying that all the reason for its interference in Africa is the improvement of the native African, and then to start on altering African institutions without in the least understanding them. It seems to me that the leading men among the European educated Africans have depended too much on the religious side of the question.

I myself am a descendant of the European tribes, now called nations, that have established political, military, and economic dominance over the world. I confess to my sin of privilege and my reluctance to forego the perks my race and class afford me.

So ubiquitous is Western influence that most of the time it is no longer seen as an alien element intruding into non-Western societies. It is an influence that has become integrated into the mind and body, the heart and soul of the non-Western human being. Western dominance, in other words, has become normal, it has become natural. By making it so natural and so normal to be 'Western', the centres of power in the West have achieved their ultimate triumph.

The main reason western culture has been dominant is because Europeans have controlled political, economic and social power including educational policy for the last several centuries.

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.

It was enough to be familiar with European culture - enough just to be a European, born or naturalized - to feel oneself the master, lord of the house, the world's custodian. For this European needed no qualifications, no additional knowledge, no particular qualities of mind or character. I observed this still in the 1950s and 1960s in Africa and Asia. Some European, in his own country very average, even incompetent, and held in law regard, right away became a high commissioner, the chairman of a great concern, director of a hospital or school when he arrived in Malaysia or Malawi.

If you're white working with non-white people, you will be branded as a colonialist by some people, regardless of your efforts or intentions.

Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.

Western interests: imperialism, colonialism, exploitation, racism, and other negative -isms.

I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception.

I'm not like most comedians. I don't deal with just heckles - I'm also dealing with threats and anger. Here I am, a brown person on stage being quite blunt. I talk about white privilege; I talk about U.S. imperialistic practices; I talk about colonialism. I'm not saying things that are easy for people to laugh at.

The liberal psyche wants to protect minorities, to apologize for imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and the appalling treatment of black people during the civil rights movement. At the same time, they want to continue to defend the rights of individuals.

Australia has a very big history of incarceration. What does that mean to us? What does it mean that we came over to a country that's not necessarily ours and filled it with white prisoners?

Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.

Too often a story is examined through biased eyes, without a sensitivity for everyone who forged it. It's seen from the point of view of the great white savior, and rarely is the perspective of the slave a part.