“You already know enough. So do I. It is not the knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions”
—Sven Lindquist (1932-2019)
“The history of imperialism is a well full of corpses.”
—Sven Lindquist (1932-2019)
“The flatter the desert, the more you become imprisoned and locked in by the horizon. You welcome every movement that elevates you and provides a view. You welcome every interruption: hills with hard peaks like the neck of a broken bottle; great movable yellow boulders; or quite simply distant heights coloured milky white or pale blue by the distance.”
—Sven Lindquist (1932-2019)
“European world expansion, accompanied as it was by a shameless defence of extermination, created habits of thought and political precedents that made way for new outrages, finally culminating in the most horrendous of them all: the Holocaust.”
—Sven Lindquist (1932-2019)
“Too many Europeans interpreted military superiority as intellectual and even biological superiority.”
—Sven Lindquist (1932-2019)
“Auschwitz was the modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination had long since rested.”
—Sven Lindquist (1932-2019)
“Africa as setting and backdrop, which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?”
—Sven Lindquist (1932-2019)