Best 84 quotes in «haiti quotes» category

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    The State should have made sure the money given to the NGOs was used according to a global plan for Haiti; not doing whatever they want. They should be supervised and have to report and make sure the money is being used properly. They are here, but we are seeing no results.

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    The structure of apartheid is still rooted in the Haitian society. When you have apartheid, you don't see those behind the walls. That is the reality of Haiti.

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    We've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax.

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    This was a "bad" example for U.S. slaves. Haiti was subjected to an embargo from the United States, which, along with many other countries, refused to recognize this new republic.

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    What happened to Haiti is a threat that could happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations, you know, because of global warming, because of climate change and all this.

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    Whenever an earthquake or tsunami takes thousands of innocent lives, a shocked world talks of little else.

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    When I came in, Haiti was not governed by Haitians anymore. Probably mostly by NGOs. And that has done what to Haiti? It has weakened our institution.

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    Vodou is one of the religions practiced in Haiti, a rich religion for the people.

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    We should be focused on the Haiti earthquake victims, not on what contracts your company should get, if you're a friend of Bill [Clinton].

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    Where there is creativity there is hope and Haiti is the most hopeful place I've experienced

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    Without question, conditions in the Haiti are worse since Aristide's removal, and continue to deteriorate.

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    A native man in his small wooden boat was hoping to make one last sale. He held up a woodcarving of a Haitian drummer and shouted up that I could have it for only $10. I wasn’t really interested and was ready to walk away when I heard him offer it again, this time for $5. Looking at an approaching police boat, I agreed to the deal, and lowered my $5 down to him in a bucket. He ignored the cops, who were ordering him away from the ship using a megaphone, and tied the carving onto the lanyard that, just before, had a bucket attached to it. The police warned him once more, to back away from the ship, but the deal was more important to him. Just as I pulled on the lanyard, I heard a shot go off. It took several moments for me to comprehend what had happened. The cop had shot the man I was bartering with! I could see that it hadn’t been a warning shot as blood came from an obvious wound right between his eyes! I continued pulling my carving up and over the railing. Looking down I saw the patrol boat heading back to shore. The poor vendor was floating face down, alongside his boat. As the ship started to pull away, I saw that he was adrift in a growing pool of blood, which was spreading out around him. Life was cheap here and I realized that the old woman’s prediction had come true. I had seen death before leaving Haiti!

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    Accident - A statistical inevitability. Some nuclear power plants are built on fault lines, but ever mine, dam, oil rig, and waste dump is founded upon a tacit acceptance of the worst-case scenario. One a long enough timeline, everything that can go wrong will, however small the likelihood is from one day to the next. The responsible parties may wring their hands about the Fukushima meltdown - and the Gult of Mexico oil spill, and the Exxon Valdez, and Hurricane Katrina, and Chernobyl, and Haiti - but accident is no accident.

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    Anytime one tries to take fragments of one's personal mythology and make them understandable to the whole world, one reaches back to the past. It must be dreamed again.

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    Al mercatino si contratta accanitamente, al supermercato, invece, si paga senza battere ciglio il prezzo indicato. Per far quadrare i conti, il cliente si sottomette al più forte ma schiaccia il più debole.

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    By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.

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    Bearing witness from the sides of the room, ten or more lepers shouted at the bizarre scene, “Diable! Diable!” And then chants of some sort, or prayers, followed by more shouts of “Diable!” They were hurling these words at Moreau like stones.

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    Comme toutes les sociétés humaines, le peuple haïtien a ses qualités et ses défauts. Ce n'est faire ni une oeuvre juste ni une oeuvre saine que d'insister continuellement sur ses défauts, sans mettre en relief ses qualités, qui ne sont pas moins réelles et qui ne contribuent pas moins à composer sa véritable physionomie.

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    En canvi, hi ha cultures on la primacia de la masculinitat és insignificant. Un exemple clar d'això el trobem a Haití, on no existeix una pressió social per demostrar la virilitat ni s'exigeix als homes que es diferenciïn de les dones. En aquesta societat no existeixen tasques pròpies dels homes i tasques pròpies de les dones. Aquesta falta de diferenciació dels rols sexuals té la seva ressonància en l'idioma haitià, que gramaticalment no expressa el gènere. En la cultura haitiana s'espera que els homes no només siguin passius i complaents sinó que també ignorin els greuges. No existeix un concepte d'honor masculí que calgui defensar, ni una venjança que calgui portar a terme.

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    Don't give me no 'but you're beautiful on the inside' bullshit." "No, you are beautiful on the outside," I say. "Don't give me that bullshit either. I'm beautiful when I say I'm beautiful. Let me own that shit," she says. Her eyes have not left the computer screen this whole time, but I know she's paying attention to everything I say. "Okay, then you are ugly." "Thanks for being honest." "Seriously. That's what we say in Haiti. 'Nou led, men nou la.' We are ugly, but we are here." "We are ugly, but we are here," she says, almost whispering. "I hear that.

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    Etranger qui marches dans ma ville/ souviens-toi que la terre que tu foules/ est terre du poète/ et la plus noble et la plus belle

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    Haiti où la négritude se mit debout pour la première fois et dit qu'elle croyait à son humanité.

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    Imperialism vaunts its exploitation of the wealth of Africa for the benefit of civilisation. In reality, from the very nature of its system of production for profit it strangles the real wealth of the continent -the creative capacity of the African people.

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    I have always enjoyed cemeteries. Altars for the living as well as resting places for the dead, they are entryways, I think, to any town or city, the best places to become acquainted with the tastes of the inhabitants, both present and gone.

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    If we don't counterbalance our blows with blessings, we will become closed and cynical about life. Then we are really kidnapped and enslaved, inside, where no one can get us.

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    In spite of its poverty, its political upheavals, its lack of resources, Haiti is not a peripheral place. Its history has made it a center.

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    My biggest fear is seeing myself in a grave without becoming the President of Haiti one day to save my country.

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    It was amusing to look at that colorful case so symbolic of an entire nation. Haiti, it is said, is the place to discover how much can be done with little.

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    It's a marriage of convenience. Temporarily, so long as our interests coincide, however long it takes to dispose of that mob of petit blancs at Port-au-Prince. Afterward,' he waved his sticky fingers airily, 'everything will return to the way it was before.

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    O mon pays si triste est la saison/ qu'il est venu le temps de se parler par signes

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    Nous ne savons pas encore que nous sommes une force, une seule force: tous les habitants, tous les nègres des plaines et des mornes réunis. Un jour, quand nous aurons compris cette vérité, nous nous lèverons d'un point à l'autre du pays et nous ferons l'assemblée générale des gouverneurs de la rosée, le grand coumbite des travailleurs de la terre pour défricher la misère et planter la vie nouvelle.

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    No place in Haiti was easy to get to and to drive to their lodge would take a couple of hours, so they sent a van to pick us up. It was already evening and the sun had just set, as we made our way up into the mountains behind Port-au-Prince. As we bounced along the dirt road winding through the hills, I could distinctly hear the rhythm of drums and see fires on the distant mountains. Mrs. Allen, who was with us, explained that in the 1940’s devout members of the Catholic faith considered the Voodoo rites an abomination of their faith. They armed themselves and started to eradicate from Haiti what they considered a cult. The entire thing turned into a war! They burned voodoo temples and shrines, and killed some of the practitioners as well as voodoo priests. In the end, the Catholic hierarchy gave up and after a time reached a tacit understanding with them. They now allowed Voodoo drums and songs to be sung in Catholic Church services and ignored what they once called devil worship.

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    O mon pays/ je t'aime comme un être de chair/ et je sais ta souffrance et je vois ta misère/ et me demande la rage au coeur/ quelle main a tracé sur le registre des nations/ une petite étoile à coté de ton nom

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    On pouvait être a court de nourriture dans le pays, il y avait toujours de la couleur.

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    Qui ose encore aimer ce pays/ et le dire?

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    Shit, man, if you see a dog scratching at the dirt trying to dig something up, walk away real fast,” he said, then pulled a little square of paper from his pocket and swallowed whatever was folded inside.

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    The author also participated in Operation Uphold Democracy (in Haiti, a year after the catastrophic denouement of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia). ... Hope was not restored in Somalia. Democracy was not upheld in Haiti.

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    The development of the sugar industry was to have a significant impact on the politics and culture of the island, since it lead to a huge increase in Cuba's slave population. This in turn helped to fuel the growth of the island's white racism, fueled by the migrants from Santo Domingo and Louisiana. The image of the Haitian revolution, and the inflated memory of its excesses — echoed not just in Cuba, but in the United States and Latin America as well — was to hover over Cuba throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, a permanent intimation of what might happen to the white population if faulty political or administrative decisions were made. Many whites in Cuba felt that they lived permanently in the shadow of a slave rebellion on the Haitian model.

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    The fervor and single-mindedness of this deification probably have no precedent in history. It's not like Duvalier or Assad passing the torch to the son and heir. It surpasses anything I have read about the Roman or Babylonian or even Pharaonic excesses. An estimated $2.68 billion was spent on ceremonies and monuments in the aftermath of Kim Il Sung's death. The concept is not that his son is his successor, but that his son is his reincarnation. North Korea has an equivalent of Mount Fuji—a mountain sacred to all Koreans. It's called Mount Paekdu, a beautiful peak with a deep blue lake, on the Chinese border. Here, according to the new mythology, Kim Jong Il was born on February 16, 1942. His birth was attended by a double rainbow and by songs of praise (in human voice) uttered by the local birds. In fact, in February 1942 his father and mother were hiding under Stalin's protection in the dank Russian city of Khabarovsk, but as with all miraculous births it's considered best not to allow the facts to get in the way of a good story.

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    The slopes to treachery from the dizzy heights of revolutionary leadership are always so steep and slippery that leaders, however well intentioned, can never build their fences too high

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    The worst feeling was poor. Because in Haiti, so many people are poor, it's nothing to be ashamed of. And there's always a way to degaje, to get by, even when you have nothing. But misery in the United States is harder than misery in Haiti. You feel like it's your fault for being poor. And if you don't have any money, you can't eat. You won't have a house. If you fall, there's nowhere to go and no one to catch you. Everyone back in Haiti assumes that once you've arrived lòt bò, that it's a good life, that you're living well. And it feels so shameful to tell anyone that it's not true.

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    Quel peuple!" Ils sont tellement habitués à chercher la vie dans des conditions difficiles qu'ils porteront l'espérance jusqu'en enfer.

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    Style is obviously important in Haiti. A lot of people wore bright colors and neatly pressed shirts. The taxis and billboards were beautiful. Haiti is not afraid of color. And texture. And depth. The young people looked fierce and bored. They looked like pure energy. There was true aesthetic but also a palpable darkness. I mean, let's get real. Kids are slaves here. Kids are bought and sold and put to work.

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    There are and always will be some who, ashamed of the behaviour of their ancestors, try to prove that slavery was not so bad after all, that its evils and its cruelty were the exaggerations of propagandists and not the habitual lot of the slaves. Men will say (and accept) anything in order to foster national pride or soothe a troubled conscience.

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    The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.

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    You cannot avoid hearing drums in Haiti.

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    Vincent did all that a man could do. Even in trying to detach Christophe from Toussaint he was acting, as he thought, in the best interests of France and of San Domingo. To him the restoration of slavery was unthinkable . . . Many an honest subordinate has in this way been the unwilling instrument of the inevitable treachery up above; the trouble is that when faced with the brutal reality he goes in the end with his own side, and by the very confidence which his integrity created does infinitely more harm than the open enemy.

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    At the same time, it is obvious that clinicians in Haiti are faced with different, and, in fact, greater, challenges when attempting to treat complications of HIV disease.

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    As a foreign worker in Haiti, speaking for myself, speaking for the workers, our organization is about 95 percent Haitian, but even foreign workers driving through, we have had very minimal security issues.

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    A Wedding In Haiti is a great experience and its unaffected prose is as true a portrait of complex Haiti as you will find.

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