“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.”

The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.

Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It’s very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.

The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.

Violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.

People who promote the free market and growth are far more romantic, and far more ideologically driven and blinded by their vision than somebody who goes in and comments about the beauty of a forest or the stars in the sky.

Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened.

The world’s ‘freeest’ country has the highest number in prison.

Sometimes there’s truth in old cliches. There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice.

The revolution cannot be funded. It’s not the imagination of trusts and foundations that’s going to bring real change.

I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don’t know.

We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.

NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.

Excitement always leads to tears.

I’m not ambitious. I don’t want to get anywhere, I don’t want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don’t want anything. I don’t want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.

NGOs are dangerous. They do what the missionaries used to do in Colonial times. They are Trojan Horses. The worse the situation, the more the NGOs.

It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the world is not yet anywhere near to being fully civilized.

I have sighed when obliged to confess that either Nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial.

There is a difference between someone telling you they love you and them actually loving you.

The love you put out into the world, makes a difference.

From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort, and pleasure.

One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve had growing up is the belief that I cannot make a difference.