“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.”

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.

Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.

A political struggle that does not have women at the heart of it, above it, below it, and within it is no struggle at all.

Had Mittag-Leffler had his way, I should have to wait until the year 1984, which to me seemed too great a demand!

ULTIMATUM, n. In diplomacy, a last demand before resorting to concessions.

For me the most radical demand of Christian faith lies in summoning the courage to say yes to the present risenness of Jesus Christ.

Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.

Our religion doesn’t demand perfection but instead a manageable strive to better ourselves.

Have you ever played a video game that didn’t have escalating levels of difficulty? Well, life can feel like play, too, when we purposefully engage in activities that demand we test and develop our skills.

My talents are in demand, and my unique gifts are appreciated by those around me.

I have one life and one chance to make it count for something… My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.