“Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.”

Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.

To annihilate indigenous populations eventually paves the way to our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. We think they are relics of the past, but they may be the gatekeepers to our future.

Some things come with their own punishments.

Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.

Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

Even capitalists must surely admit, that intellectually at least, socialism is a worthy opponent. It imparts intelligence even to its adversaries.

Money need not be our only reward.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Many people have accused me of having a romantic view, whereas I personally I feel sorry for those who have lost romance in their lives.

I feel ashamed that the new, nuclear, neo-liberal India thinks of itself as a ‘natural ally’ of Israel. Ever since India began to call itself an emerging superpower, it has become a slavish, groveling satellite state of the US.

The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.

What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.

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.

Is globalization about ‘the eradication of world poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?

If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?

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.

You are like a wrecked ship in the depths of the ocean, collapsed and eroded but still, full of pearl oysters.

But the act of holding on speaks to me so much more about a human heart than the courage of letting go ever could.

These poets and their metaphors lied to me/ you never felt like a mountain I wished to climb/ or a stream I would let myself float in/ or a scent I was dying to bottle in/ these poets lie when they talk of love.

All my life has been a struggle to know, what to hold on and what to let go, but still, i end up sitting in the corner of the room with a flickering candle, whimpering, naked, shuddering, lost.

Stop giving your infant heart/ wrapped in blind vows/ white lies/ and a haunted past/ stop asking for love/ if you don’t know how to give any/ stop hurting others/ stop it/ stop it/ just fucking stop it.

Without literature, life is hell.

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.