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"What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip."
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"On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education."
"The Indians gave up the land of their own free will, and for it received brass kettles, blankets, guns, shirts, flints, tobacco, rum and many trinkets in which their simple hearts delighted."
"Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!"
"Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it."
"What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip."
Explore more quotes by Doris Lessing
"Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty."
"The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind."
"It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction."
"Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them."
"Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so."
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