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.
ARUNDHATI ROYWhen people say “the people” or “the public” as though it’s the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.
More Arundhati Roy Quotes
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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.
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Sometimes there’s truth in old cliches. There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice.
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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.
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Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
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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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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.
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Money need not be our only reward.
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If we were to lose the ability to be emotional, if we were to lose the ability to be angry, to be outraged, we would be robots. And I refuse that.
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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.
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That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
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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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The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
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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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The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government’s policies, that are so hated.
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Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
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