“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.”

The idea of justice – even just dreaming of justice – is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust – and then tries to make it more accountable.

Is globalization about ‘the eradication of world poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?

If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?

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.

Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.

Anything’s possible in Human Nature …Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.

The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.

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.

The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government’s policies, that are so hated.

There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

When people say “the people” or “the public” as though it’s the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.

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.

That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

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.

Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.