Eurocentrism Quotes

To those who say derogatory things about colonialism, I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.

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.

Western fundamentalism: By this term I mean the elevation of Western modernity above all other ways of knowing and being and it includes adherence to capitalism, individualism, patriarchy, scientific rationalism, ‘Christian’ morality, commodification of the environment, private property and a belief in progress.

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.

The world still consists of two clearly divided groups: the English and the foreigners. One group consists of less than 50 million people; the other of 3,950 million. The latter group does not really count.

At about the age of seven … I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

Africa and its people are the most written about and the least understood of all of the world's people. This condition started in the 15th and the 16th centuries with the beginning of the slave trade system. The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people.

I have been obsequious toward Western civilization, exaggerating its merits and, at the same time, exaggerating my own merits.

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.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe.

American prejudices about Europe rarely surface in headlines, but they are real, pervasive, and ingrained.

I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the value of the Orientals themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.

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

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.

America has this understanding of Africans that plays like National Geographic: a bunch of Negroes with loincloths running around the plain fields of Africa chasing gazelles.

But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

As the Persians wrote very little about how they ran their affairs, the Greek propaganda of the 5th century B.C. has for centuries gone virtually unchallenged - indeed, for Edward Said, it was the beginning of Europe's long habit of misunderstanding and ill-informed contempt of the Middle East.

In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.

Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists; they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal adult behavior in lower races.

The American model was celebrated by Thatcherites and New Labour alike, California worshipped as the model of the future, 'Anglo-Saxon' embalmed as the fitting metaphor for the shared Anglo-American legacy, Europe denigrated and the rest of the world ignored.

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.

European authors often write books about the rest of the world that profess a vision of shared humanity but fall far short, casting the other as exotic or dangerous.

There's an undeniable tradition of sexism in this country that ties into the move westward by people of European descent and different ways of looking at Manifest Destiny on the west side of the Mississippi River.

History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder, so when you read that, for example, David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, you might be forgiven for thinking that there was nobody around the Falls until Livingstone arrived on the scene

The West will never understand Muslims so long as we ... judge them by the rules we are accustomed to apply to ourselves.