The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.
ARUNDHATI ROYViolating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.
More Arundhati Roy Quotes
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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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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.
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Excitement always leads to tears.
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If you’re happy in a dream, does that count?
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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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Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.
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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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I’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.
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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.
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Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.
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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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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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Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.
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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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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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