Slobodan Milosevic Quotes

Whole Indian nations have melted away like snowballs in the sun before the white man's advance. They leave scarcely a name of our people except those wrongly recorded by their destroyers.

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

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.

You get people talking about being worried about their art, and dances... their culture being wiped out or taken over, and yet these same people are taking advantage of their people to use them as cheap labour.

You can’t undo a thousand years of history by sending military troops into a country.

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.

Having uncritically accepted [Western] culture in everything, we now find we have lost our hold on the autonomous ideals of the Japanese race.

A nation creates itself not just with what it remembers, but with what it forgets.

A nation is a work of art and a work of time.

I expected to find a contest between a government and a people: I found two nations (French and English) warring in the bosom of a single state: I found a struggle, not of principles, but of races.

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

Many have passed idly through the Indian schools during the last decade, afterward to boast of their charity to the North American Indian. But few there are who have paused to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization

Sober-thoughted men, far from the scenes of danger, in the security of cities and populous regions, can talk of exterminating measures, and discuss the policy of extirpating thousands… in a little while, the remaining tribes will go the way that so many have gone before. They will vanish like a vapor from the face of the earth – their very history will be lost in forgetfulness.

We came to a region that was inhabited by Arabs, and we set up a Jewish state. In many places, we purchased the land from Arabs and set up Jewish villages where there had once been Arab villages. You don't even know the names of the previous Arab villages and I don't blame you, because those geography books aren't around anymore. Not only the books, the villages aren't around...

Nationalism is spiritual and all-embracing, in the sense that it opens its arms to and spreads its wings over all those who have shared with the Arabs their history and have lived in the environment of their language and culture for generations, so that they have become Arab in thought and feeling. There is no fear that nationalism will clash with religion, for, like religion, it flows from the heart and issues from the will of God; they walk arm in arm, supporting each other, especially when religion represents the genius of the nationality and is in harmony with its nature.

Where new states have come into being, they have invariably swaddled themselves in sacred symbols and shibboleths forged in more dedicated struggles, beginning with an often random tricolor and a national anthem.

I think that's what makes many Swedes jealous of immigrant groups. You have a culture, an identity, a history, something that brings you together. And what do we have? We have Midsummer's Eve and such silly things.

I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. … I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.

We must facilitate the dying out of all the names if individual peoples inhabiting China i.e., Manchus, Tibetans, etc.

What colonialism does is cause an identity crisis about one's own culture.

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.

Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

In the end, there is no absence of irony: the integrity of what is sacred to Native Americans will be determined by the government that has been responsible for doing everything in its power to destroy Native American cultures.