Farida > Farida's Quotes

“The unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.”
― Frantz Fanon

“Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.”
― Francis Bacon

“It is a grave injustice to a child or adult to insist that they stop crying. One can comfort a person who is crying which enables him to relax and makes further crying unnecessary; but to humiliate a crying child is to increase his pain, and augment his rigidity. We stop other people from crying because we cannot stand the sounds and movements of their bodies. It threatens our own rigidity. It induces similar feelings in ourselves which we dare not express and it evokes a resonance in our own bodies which we resist.”
― Alexander Lowen, The Voice of the Body

“Resentment is often a woman's inner signal that she has been ignoring an important God-given responsibility - that of making choices.”
― Brenda Waggoner

“A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.”
― Benedict Anderson

“but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.”
― Pierre Bourdieu

“To subject to scrutiny the mechanisms which render life painful, even untenable, is not to neutralize them; to bring to light contradictions is not to resolve them. But, as skeptical as one might be about the efficacy of the sociological message, we cannot dismiss the effect it can have by allowing sufferers to discover the possible social causes of their suffering and, thus, to be relieved of blame.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society

“To operate within the matrix of
power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“The British were no longer selling slaves to America, but slavery had not ended, and his father did not seem to think that it would end. They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that wrapped around wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“This is how we all come to the world, James. Weak and needy, desperate to learn how to be a person.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi