Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations.
ARUNDHATI ROYPeople rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead.
More Arundhati Roy Quotes
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I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.
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Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.
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There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
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States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence – so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only – or well that’s excessive – usually, the resistance.
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Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation.
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That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
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Use your art to fight.
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Money need not be our only reward.
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Whatever else their faults may be, they were not radical Islamist states – Iraq was not, Syria is not, Libya was not. The most radical fundamentalist Islamist state is, of course, your America’s Saudi Arabia.
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He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.
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As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I’ve spent my whole life fighting tradition. There’s no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.
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Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.
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Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum – all we are supposed to expect – but human rights aren’t enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.
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People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead.
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How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international con�icts of today.
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