States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence – so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only – or well that’s excessive – usually, the resistance.
ARUNDHATI ROYYou 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.
More Arundhati Roy Quotes
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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.
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What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.
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I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don’t know.
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Is globalization about ‘the eradication of world poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?
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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.
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Excitement always leads to tears.
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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.
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There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
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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.
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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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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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Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.
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Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.
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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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Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
ARUNDHATI ROY






