Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
ARUNDHATI ROYI’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.
More Arundhati Roy Quotes
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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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The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.
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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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I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don’t know.
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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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Even capitalists must surely admit, that intellectually at least, socialism is a worthy opponent. It imparts intelligence even to its adversaries.
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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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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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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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Some things come with their own punishments.
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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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What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.
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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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Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.
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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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