The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
ARUNDHATI ROYDemocracy 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.
More Arundhati Roy Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The revolution cannot be funded. It’s not the imagination of trusts and foundations that’s going to bring real change.
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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.
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At a time when opportunism is everything, when hope seems lost, when everything boils down to a cynical business deal, we must find the courage to dream. To reclaim romance. The romance of believing in justice, in freedom, and in dignity. For everybody.
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Privatization is presented as being the only alternative to an inefficient, corrupt state. In fact, it is not a choice at all… it is a mutually profitable business contract between the private company (preferably foreign) and the ruling elite of the Third World.
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Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.
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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.
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