What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.
ARUNDHATI ROYNationalism 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.
More Arundhati Roy Quotes
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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.
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Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They’re usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there’s the business of war.
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Some things come with their own punishments.
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When people say “the people” or “the public” as though it’s the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.
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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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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.
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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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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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If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?
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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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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.
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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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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.
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The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.
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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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