Fela Kuti Quotes

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language.

In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.

Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.

I am not anti-English, and I never was.

It wasn't so long ago that it was not popular to speak Gaelic in Ireland because the areas that Gaelic is spoken in were much poorer areas.

It's problematic being an Arab who writes in Hebrew.

The psychology of a language which, in one way or another, is imposed upon one because of factors beyond one's control, is very different from the psychology of a language which one accepts of one's free will.

I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

They made me use an accent, which I wasn't thrilled about because a lot of us, obviously, don't have them.

Everything bad about France was transferred to Quebec.

I'm against the idea of force-feeding all of Canada on two languages.

The basis of any independent government is a national language, and we can no longer continue aping our former colonizers ... those who feel they cannot do without English can as well pack up and go.

When California passes a law saying that English is the official language, it can only mean one thing: That English is no longer the official language.

I didn't always value the ways black people talked. I thought, in order to make art out of it, you had to change it.

I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists' language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master and making you Caliban. That thinking just denies you an outlet. You deny everything that is great from a language, whether it is Conrad or Shakespeare.

Native Americans' families experience living surrounded, living in increasingly small reservations surrounded by the society that destroyed their civilization, and are still stigmatized. For decades and decades, for hundreds of years except in Indian schools, they weren't allowed to speak their language. That stigma takes a terrible toll.

When an American person hears you speak a different language, you're automatically the bad guy.

We Irish had the right word on the tip of our tongue, but the imperialist got at that. What should trip off it we trip over.

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.

There is a perception of the general irrelevance of aboriginal culture….We haven't gone anywhere. We still exist. …. Get the hell out of our lives and give us our land back.

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

William the Conqueror had so great an abhorrence of the English language, that he commanded all the laws and law-proceedings to be in French; and even the children in school were taught the first elements of grammar and letters in French and not in English.

I did hold the language laws of Quebec up to ridicule because they are officious and ridiculous.

Bilingualism is not an imposition on the citizens - it is an imposition on the state.