Harry Hay Quotes

When someone tries to take over a country or a culture, they destroy the art.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.

I don't feel alienated from American culture, but I understand people who do.

I would point out that the cultural advance of these people has been suppressed in the past and continues to be suppressed in the present by policies designed to keep them in ignorance.

The hostility to all Indian ways and culture that characterized so much of Government policy now appears to have been a mistake.

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.

When you grow up as a minority in a majority culture, a lot of times, you're just trying to fit in.

I hate the anglicanisation of culture, the idea that culture is genteel. It's not genteel.

The easiest way to subjugate a people is to erase a culture. I've seen it in war zones.

We have taken so much from your culture, I wish you had taken something from ours...For there were some beautiful and good things within it. Perhaps now that the time has come, We are fearful that what you take will be lost.... I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success: His education, his skills, and society.

Spanish civilization crushed the Indian. English civilization scorned and neglected him. French civilization embraced and cherished him.

Your new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half child.

For many years, our Messianic Jewish brothers and sisters have paid a great price. Other Jews have rejected them, and the Christian church would require they walk away from their traditions to fit into the Gentile culture. We must face these past wrongs.

Everything bad about France was transferred to Quebec.

I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.

Exploitation was rampant before statehood, and various factions actively tried to eradicate the roots of Hawaiian culture in the process of converting the natives to European religious beliefs. Some of the results can never be undone. We try to honor what is left.

I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living with French culture.

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

O Muslims! When a Muslim blindly imitates the West, he turns into a loyal supporter of their beliefs and customs; he is like one who tries to reform something but spoils it while he is unaware. He is just like a defeated follower, like a baby who bites and severs his mother's breast while it is in his mouth. Such a person does not know that blind copying of the West involves hidden hazards and that our rights, honor and dignity are violated by such imitation and imbecilic pride.

I had been preserved from the spirit-breaking Indian schools… My psychology, therefore, had not been shot to pieces by that cheap attitude of the Indian service, whose one aim was to “civilize” the race youth, by denouncing his parents, his customs, his people wholesale, and filling the vacuum they had created with their vulgar notions of what constituted civilization.

The white people … are trying to make us over into their image

No encouragement must be given to social and political organizations or methods which perpetuate in this country foreign ideas and customs. An Irish-American, a German-American, or a French-American vote is an intolerable anomaly.

... there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them.

All these shortcomings stem from the laziness of the Cambodians [Khmer]… teach them agriculture. As for language, they should be taught to speak Vietnamese. Our dress and table manners must also be followed. If there is any out-dated or barbarous custom that can be simplified or repressed, then do so.