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.
ARUNDHATI ROYPower is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.
More Arundhati Roy Quotes
-
-
Things can change in a day.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
The revolution cannot be funded. It’s not the imagination of trusts and foundations that’s going to bring real change.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It’s over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don’t.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
But remember that if the struggle were to resort to violence, it will lose vision, beauty and imagination. Most dangerous of all, it will marginalize and eventually victimize women. And 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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Anything’s possible in Human Nature …Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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 ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Even capitalists must surely admit, that intellectually at least, socialism is a worthy opponent. It imparts intelligence even to its adversaries.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government’s policies, that are so hated.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY