Quotes on Goa

In a recent post on Goanet, FN pieced together some quotable quotes on Goa. Here are the quotes...


This town was very large, with goodly edifices and handsome streets and squares, surrounded by walls and towers. There is a very good fortress in it, and in the environs many gardens and orchards of fine trees and fruits, and many pools of good water.

- Duarte Barbosa describing Goa, centuries ago.

Goans are a tolerant, informal people, team-oriented and people-oriented and supportive of one another's work. They are both individually and socially responsive.

- Fr Romualdo R De Souza, founder, Goa Institute of Management and former Director of Xavier Labour Relations Institute, Jamshedpur. Also founder-director of Xavier Institute of Management Bhubaneswar.

Goa has achieved a remarkable level of social cohesion since its liberation in 1961. It is relatively free of the communal and caste tensions which have vitiated (the) investment climate elsewhere.... A sense of relaxation which every visitor feels in Goa is a product of its life-style, which is in consonance with mother nature, and a sense of fulfillment which the people of Goa exhibit in their day-to-day life.

- V. A. Pai Panandiker, economist, earlier director of Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Most of us are aware of 450 years of European dominance and the institutional, religious and legal imperatives resulting from it. Some of us are aware of a change-over in the last thirty years from a predominantly Christian to a symbiotic Hindu-Christian society, where the Hindu element has supplanted the Christian in numerical terms. Very few of us are conscious about the impact that the overlay of a globalised-homogenised dominant culture has and continues to have upon the manifestation of an indigenous culture.

- Cho Padamsee, former principal, Goa College of Architecture.

Before the 16th century, Goa was a languid Elysium, a remote province on the periphery of large kingdoms, ensconced in the wooded foothills of the Western Ghats. In the 16th century, it was suddenly elevated to the status of being the eastern metropolis of the Portuguese empire, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It then became the seat of a Christian imperialism whose influence, in the east, encompassed the area between the Cape of Good Hope and the Sea of Japan.

- Jose Pereira, Professor Emeritus of Theology, Fordham University, New York.

[Goa's] metropolitan dignity was embodied in structures of an appropriate grandeur during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Then, as the Portuguese empire decayed, Goa sank into political insignificance, becoming again a soporific paradise, but retaining a sense of the former grandeur in its edifices, now enveloped by the land's idyllic landscape.

- Jose Pereira, Professor Emeritus of Theology, Fordham University, New York.