Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum – all we are supposed to expect – but human rights aren’t enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.
ARUNDHATI ROYWhatever 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.
More Arundhati Roy Quotes
-
-
Things can change in a day.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
The world’s ‘freeest’ country has the highest number in prison.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Sometimes there’s truth in old cliches. There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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 ROY -
Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
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.
ARUNDHATI ROY -
The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.
ARUNDHATI ROY