“After all, in both languages we were dealing in large measure not with English and French, but with Scots and Irish, Bretons and Normans…. There could be no more eloquent illustration of the colonial mind-set than a bunch of Celts and Vikings in a distant northern territory insulting each other as les anglais and the French as if they were the descendants of the people who had subjected and ruined them.”
Reflections of a Siamese Twin (1997)
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John Ralston Saul 85
Canadian author and essayist 1947Related quotes

“Icelanders! You are the descendants of Nordic vikings! Down with Irish slaves!”
The True Icelanders of Sviðinsvík
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Three: The House of the Poet

interview with Nikki Finke http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/43/deadline-finke.php, LA Weekly, September 17, 2004
French Bashing and Francophobia

Siwati Memorial Lecture, Honiara, Solomon Islands, 24 September 2004 http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0409/S00253.htm.

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)

“French: why does this language even exist? Everyone there speaks english anyway.”
Source: Princess in Waiting

As quoted in Think, Vol. 27 (1961), p. 32
Disputed

I became the murderer of many thousands of that fine race.
Part of a speech on his deathbed in 1087, referring to the Harrying of the North, written down by a monk named Ordericus Vitalis in 1123; as quoted in Empires and Citizens : The Roman Empire, Medieval Britain, African Empires (2003) by Ben Walsh, p. 60

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You