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Madagascar Quotes

Browse 25 quotes about Madagascar.

Madagascar Quotes

“People filed off the battered old bus. We started to push. The engine soon spluttered to life and the bus stuttered slowly forward. We were all showered in red dust, but we were laughing and cheering, with the driver horn-honking in celebration. I had even more grit between my teeth, and sand up my nose. Then there was a terrific explosion. A pall of black stuff enveloped us, adding soot to our faces. The bus juddered to a halt – again.”

AdventureWildlifeChildrens LiteratureMadagascarBus Travel
Book:Madagascar Misadventure
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“The toothless or peg-legged buccaneer hoisting a flag of defiance against the world, drinking and feasting to a stupor on stolen loot, fleeing at the first sign of serious opposition, leaving only tall tales and confusion in his wake, is, perhaps, just as much a figure of the Enlightenment as Voltaire or Adam Smith, but he also represents a profoundly proletarian vision of liberation, necessarily violent and ephemeral. Modern factory discipline was born on ships and on plantations. It was only later that budding industrialists adopted those techniques of turning humans into machines into cities like Manchester and Birmingham. One might call pirate legends, then, the most important form of poetic expression produced by that emerging North Atlantic proletariat whose exploitation laid the ground for the industrial revolution.”

AnthropologyPiratesMadagascar
Book:Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
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“We would seem to be in the presence of a genuine historical anomaly: a political entity that presented itself to the outside world as a kingdom, organized around the charismatic figure of a brilliant child of pirates, but which within operated by a decentralized grassroots democracy without any developed system of social rank. How to explain this? Are there any real historical analogies? In fact, the most obvious parallel would be pirate ships themselves. Pirate captains often tried to develop a reputation among outsiders as terrifying, authoritarian desperadoes, but on board their own ships not only were they elected by majority vote and could be removed by the same means at any time, they were also empowered to give commands only during chase or combat, and otherwise had to take part in the assembly like anybody else. There were no ranks on pirate ships, other than the captain and the quartermaster (the latter presided over the assembly). What’s more, we know of explicit attempts to translate this form of organization onto the Malagasy mainland. Finally, as we’ll see, there is a long history of buccaneers or other questionable characters who found themselves a foothold in some Malagasy port town, trying to pass themselves off as kings and princes without doing anything to reorganize actual social relations on the ground in the surrounding communities. Discipline on board sixteenth-century European ships was arbitrary and brutal, so crews often had good reason to rise up; but the law on land was unforgiving. A mutinous crew knew they had signed their own death warrants. To go pirate was to embrace this fate. A mutinous crew would declare war “against the entire world,” and hoist the “Jolly Roger.” The pirate flag, which existed in many variations, is revealing in itself. It was normally taken to be an image of the devil, but often it contained not only a skull or skeleton, but also an hourglass, signifying not a threat (“you are going to die”) so much as a sheer statement of defiance (“we are going to die, it’s only a matter of time”)—which crews making out such a flag on the horizon would likely have found, if anything, even more terrifying. Flying the Jolly Roger was a crew’s way of announcing they accepted they were on their way to hell.”

PiratesMadagascar
Book:Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
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“The Jews might have had Uganda, Madagascar, and other places for the establishment of a Jewish Fatherland, but they wanted absolutely nothing except Palestine, not because the Dead Sea water by evaporation can produce five trillion dollars of metaloids and powdered metals; not because the sub-soil of Palestine contains twenty times more petroleum than all the combined reserves of the two Americas; but because Palestine is the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa, because Palestine constitutes the veritable center of world political power, the strategic center for world control.”

WorldTwoMightWantedAmericaPoliticalWaterPowerFiveSeaProduceEuropeTwentiesDollarsJewSoilMetalsEstablishmentReservesAsiaPalestineStrategicAbsolutely NothingPolitical PowerCrossroadsZionistFatherlandPetroleumUgandaHoly LandSea WaterMadagascarEvaporation
Author:Nahum Goldmann
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“I was all for setting up a separate Jewish state in Madagascar or Palestine or someplace, but not to exterminate them. Besides, by exterminating 4 million Jews - they say 5 or 6 million at this trial, but that is all propaganda, I am sure it wasn't more than 4.5 million - they have made martyrs out of those Jews. For example, because of the extermination of these Jews, anti-Semitism has been set back many years in certain foreign countries where it had been making good progress.”

YearsHas BeensMadeCountryStatesCertainMillionsProgressExampleJewTrialsSettingSettingsPropagandaPalestineMartyrAnti SemitismForeign CountriesExterminationMadagascar
Author:Julius Streicher
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“Human relations tend to be more difficult when you're dealing with someone who weighs 30 kilograms more than you do. That's when you worry about whether a well-meaning gesture could produce complications. We have no problems with countries like Madagascar or Bolivia, for example. But Germany is our neighbor and we have a shared past. Besides, Germany is powerful and ambitious and more than four times as large as we are. It makes complete sense that we would act cautiously. It's simply Realpolitik.”

HumansWellsCountryProblemPastDifficultPowerfulWorryFourExampleProduceRelationNeighborGermanyGesturesAmbitiousNo ProblemHuman RelationsComplicationBoliviaRealpolitikMadagascar
Author:Vaclav Klaus
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“My first job was actually as a social worker. And then later, I got my PhD in anthropology. And I've always been interested in humans as well as primates. We are all kind of have the same emotions, the same goals and lives really. But to me, when I first got to Madagascar I realized that the lemurs lives are very closely related to what the humans are doing; partially because they've got both looking for natural resources. And if we can make some way that both humans and lemurs can live together peaceably and happily, that would be my goal for Madagascar.”

IfsWayFirstsHumansWellsKindWould BeTogetherJobsSocialGoalNaturalEmotionResourcesWorkersI RealizedAll KindsRelatedAnthropologyNatural ResourcesSocial WorkerPrimatesGoals And LifePhdsMadagascarLemurs
Author:Patricia Wright
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“Insects leave (Madagascar periwinkle) Catharanthus roseus out of their diets. So, for that matter, do deer. The reason is that the plants are loaded with alkaloids so potent that they are the source of vincristine and vinblastine. These are drugs important in routines of chemotherapy for treating Hodgkin's disease and certain forms of leukemia.”

ImportantMatterReasonFormCertainSourceDrugDiseasePlantDietsInsectsLoadedDeerChemotherapyLeukemiaMadagascarPeriwinkle
Author:Allen Lacy
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“When I was a student I did a report on Madagascar, and ever since then it was my biggest dream to go there. Three years ago I went, and it was so different. We live in this high tech world with Facebook, Twitter, and mobile phones, and there you land and you have nothing. Yet the people live and get by every day walking in the roads, living this super simple life, and they're still happy. It is an experience that keeps you humble, puts things in perspective.”

PeopleWorldYearsStillsDifferentDreamThreeSimpleLandStudentsPerspectiveWalkingYears AgoPhonesHumbleReportsThree YearsMobileSimple LifeMobile PhonesMadagascar
Author:Irina Shayk
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