Arundhati Roy Quotations | Page 3

The world's 'freeest' country has the highest number in prison.

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

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.

Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

Privatisation 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

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.

Some things come with their own punishments.

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.

The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution

NGOs are dangerous. They do what the missionaries used to do in Colonial times. They are Trojan Horses. The worse the situation, the more the NGOs.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

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

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.

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.

...As the disparity between the rich and the poor grows, the fight to corner resources is intensifying. To push through their "sweetheart deals," to corporatize the crops we grow, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the dreams we dream, corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. Corporate Globalization-or shall we call it by its name?-Imperialism-needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice.

Acceptance spells death to a writer.

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

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.

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.

We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.

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

It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.

People are so isolated, and so alone, and so suspicious, and so competitive with each other, and so sure that they are about to be conned by their neighbor, or by their mother, or by their sister, or their grandmother. What's the use of having fifty percent of the world's wealth, or whatever it is that you have, if you're going to live this pathetic, terrified life?

Where are these people supposed to go? This is a peaceful movement but if you're non-violent, nobody listens to you.

When a symbol unmoors itself from what it symbolizes, it loses meaning. It becomes ineffective

There have been tens of thousands of suicides by farmers in the country, and the government wants to dispute what a suicide is, who a farmer is.

Why not have your nuclear bombs in your briefcase? All of these policies that America upholds, nuclear weapons, privatization, all of these things are going to mutate and metamorphosis into these dangerous things.

Electricity produced in the name of the poor is consumed by the rich with endless appetites,

You would remember in October 2000 the court had given its judgement, it had told the government give me a rehabilitation master plan in three months...it is 2006 now, in six years it has still not even given a master plan and you are talking about rehabilitation. So, now in three months, how will rehabilitation happen? It cannot happen.