“The idea of justice – even just dreaming of justice – is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust – and then tries to make it more accountable.”

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.

The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.

Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries.

The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government’s policies, that are so hated.

There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

When people say “the people” or “the public” as though it’s the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.

Every people, every society, needs a culture of resistance, a culture of being difficult and disobedient, that is the only way they will ever be able to stand up to the inevitable abuse of power by whoever runs the state apparatus, the capitalists, the communists, the socialists, the Gandhians, whoever.

That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

I am a woman who is a granddaughter of a lady who used to be beaten on the head by her husband, of a mother who went through hell because she was divorced and had to bring up these kids. And I can take 10 men out to lunch and pay the bill, and nobody even thinks twice about it. So don’t mess with me.

Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.

The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.

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.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.

You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.

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.

I don’t want to get down I want to get high. To stay high to fly high out of it.

I wish not merely to be called Christian, but also to be Christian.

There’s a thing that just as you go to sleep, if you keep your elbows elevated that you will never go below the dream stage. And I’ve used that quite a lot and it keeps me dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed.

I look back and say, “This must have been somebody else.” I am not going to tell you that when I was 4, I dreamed about all of this.

Peace is when I am cuddled up in a snug wool blanket with a hot coffee in hand without worry in mind, so I can dream about red sunsets and the scent of warm, sun kissed bodies.

No matter your age, stage of life, or circumstances, don’t forget to dare to dream with God. You don’t have to figure anything out. Just keep saying yes to Him, in big ways and small, and watch what He does.

When your memories exceed your dreams, the end is near.

I believe that dreamers who simply imagine things that would be nice but are not possible don’t sufficiently appreciate the laws of the universe to understand the true implications of their desires, much less how to achieve them.