Rowan Broach > Rowan's Quotes

“Being a person is not a goal that can be achieved but a purpose that must be sustained.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free

“We must acknowledge the utter fragility of what holds our lives together—our institutions, our shared labor, our love, our mourning—and yet keep faith with what offers no final guarantee. This is the double movement of secular faith. (377)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“Evenings that no one else can remember live in you, when the snow touched your face or the rain caught you unprepared, when you were all alone and yet marked by all the others who have made you who you are. There are things you cannot leave behind or wish you could retrieve. And there is hope you cannot extinguish—whether buried or insistent, broken or confident, the one never excluding the other. (92)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“That those who are enslaved or live in poverty may need faith in God to carry on with their lives is not a reason to promote religious faith but a reason to abolish slavery and poverty. (27)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“The passion and pathos of living with your beloved are therefore incompatible with the security of an eternal life. The sense of something being unique and irreplaceable is inseparable from the sense that it can be lost. This relation to loss is inscribed in the very form of living on. To live on is never to repose in a timeless or endless presence. Rather, to live on is to remain after a past that has ceased to be and before an unpredictable future that may not come to be. (44)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“To keep faith in mortal life, then, is to remain vulnerable to a pain that no strength can finally master. Mortality is not only intrinsic to what makes life meaningful, but also makes life susceptible to lose meaning and become unbearable. The point is not to overcome this vulnerability but to recognize that it is an essential part of why our lifes matter and why we care. (49)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“The point of democratic socialism is not to impose a general consensus regarding what matters, but to sustain a form of life that makes it possible for us to own the question of what is worth doing with our lives—what we value individually as well as collectively—as an irreducible question of our lives.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“Even the greatest moments of happiness in love—gathering and deepening the qualitative experience of a shared life—cannot be contained in an instant, since the moment is bound up with a network of meaning that extends to the memory of a shared past and anticipations of a future together. (59)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“What we believe deep in our hearts—the hymn ["We Shall Overcome"] avows—is not that God will save us but that we shall overcome our subordination through collective action. (372)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“What ultimately matters from a religious perspective is not freedom but salvation; what ultimately matters is not to lead a life but to be saved from being alive.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“To live a free life, it is not enough that we have the right to freedom. We must have access to the material resources as well as the forms of education that allow us to pursue our freedom and to “own” the question of what to do with our time. What belongs to each one of us—what is irreducibly our own—is not property or goods but the time of our lives.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“To return to my family house is to be reminded of how my life is dependent on history: both the natural history of evolution and the social history of those who came before me. Who I can be and what I can do is not generated solely by me. My life is dependent on previous generations and on those who took care of me, with all of us in turn dependent on a history of the Earth that so easily could have been different and that might never have brought any of us into being.

Moreover, my life is historical in the sense that it is oriented toward a future that is not given. The worlds of which I am a part, the projects I sustain and that sustain me, can flourish and change in a dynamic way, but they can also break apart, atrophy, and die. The worlds that open up through my family and friends, the project that shape my work and political commitments, carry the promise of my life but also the risk that my life will be shattered or fail to make sense. In a word, both my life and the projects in which I am engaged are finite. (3-4)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“As soon as you remove the sense of finitude and vulnerability, you remove the vitality of any possible love relationship. (43)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“Christian charity does not seek to abolish poverty in this life but rather maintains the poor in an asymmetrical position of dependence on those who offer them charity, leaving them waiting for redemption in an eternal life (the new Jerusalem).”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“The depths of life are not revealed through faith in eternity. Rather, our spiritual commitments proceed from caring for what will be irrevocably lost and remaining faithful to what gives no final guarantee. Secular faith will always be precarious, but in its fragility it opens the possibility of our spiritual freedom. (36)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“If my life were complete, it would not be my life, since it would be over. In leading my life, I am not striving for an impossible completion of who I am but for the possible and fragile coherence of who I am trying to be: to hold together and be responsive to the commitments that define who I take myself to be.”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“To be finite means primarily two things: to be dependent on others and to live in relation to death. (4)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“In the story of cancer and chemistry, the harm comes from exposure, and exposure inversely follows gradients of social power. Disproportionate harm is wrought on liberalism’s second-class citizens: the working class, women and children, the disabled, the colonized.”
― Rupa Marya, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

“Elites do often make the environment worse and block solutions, but to blame the problem of elite capture entirely on their moral successes and failures is to confuse effect for cause. The true problem lies in the system itself, the built environment and rules of interaction that produced the elites in the first place.”
― olufemi o. taiwo, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

“When they realized they were in the desert, they built a religion to worship thirstiness.”
― Zach Weiner

“Everyone lives a lie. Pick a lie you like.”
― Zach Weiner

“If people spent as much time studying as they spent hating, I’d be writing this from a goddamn moon-base.”
― Zach Weiner

“The compulsion to be happy at work, in other words, is always a demand for emotional work from the worker. Work, after all, has no feelings. Capitalism cannot love.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“We want to call work what is work so that eventually we might rediscover what is love.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“It’s not the people that are the problem. It is the way we consume through this food system, which allows a few to eat healthily, many to eat unhealthily, and many more not to eat at all.”
― Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System - Revised and Updated

“Capitalism's geography has a distinctive pyrogeography, one that is part of the fossil record. Indigenous People had thoroughly modified New World landscapes through fire. In eastern North America, they coproduced the 'mosaic quality' of forest, savannah, and meadow that Europeans took for pristine nature. Between Columbus' arrival and around 1650, disease and colonial violence reduced Indigenous populations in the Americas by 95 percent. With fewer humans burning and cutting them down, forests recovered so vigorously that the New World became a planetary carbon sink. Forest growth cooled the planet so much that the Indigenous holocaust contributed to the Little Ice Age's severity....it would be wrong to characterize this episode of genocide and reforestation as anthropogenic. The colonial exterminations of Indigenous Peoples were the work not of all humans, but of conquerors and capitalists. *Capitalogenic* would be more appropriate. And if we are tempted to conflate capitalism with the Industrial Revolution, these transformations ought to serve notice that early capitalism's destruction was so profound that it changed planetary climate four centuries ago.”
― Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

“This process of discovery is science: the continual refinement and testing of our understanding, alongside the digging that reveals even more to be understood.”
― Helen Czerski, Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life

“Critical thinking is essential to make sense of our world, especially with advertisers and politicians all telling us loudly that they know best. We need to be able to look at the evidence and work out whether we agree with them.”
― Helen Czerski, Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life

“Society sharply and criminally limits human potential. There exists at present a gross underuse of talent. This probably means that the cure for cancer is trapped in a slum-dweller’s cortex somewhere in India.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion