Nat > Nat's Quotes

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
― Agatha Christie

“Isn't there someone kind enough to come strangle me in my sleep?”
― Ryunosuke Akutagawa

“The author and intellectual Cornel West has said that 'justice is what love looks like in public.' I often think that neoliberalism is what lovelessness looks like as policy.”
― Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

“I’m not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has. —JOHN TRUDELL”
― Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics

“A state of shock is produced when a story is ruptured… Trump is not a rupture at all, but rather the culmination – the logical end point – of a great many dangerous stories our culture has been telling for a very long time. That greed is good. That the market rules. That money is what matters in life. That white men are better than the rest. That the natural world is there for us to pillage. That the vulnerable deserve their fate and the one percent deserve their golden towers. That anything public or commonly held is sinister and not worth protection. That we are surrounded by danger and should only look after our own. That there is no alternative to any of this.”
― Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

“the stories that produced [Trump] were always contested. There were always other stories, ones that insisted that money is not what’s valuable, and that all of our fates are intertwined with one another and with the health of the natural world… while Trump is the logical culmination of the current neoliberal system, the current neoliberal system is not the only logical culmination of the human story”
― Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

“The ability to discount darker people and darker nations in order to justify stealing their land and labor was foundational, and none of it would have been possible without those theories of racial supremacy that gave the whole morally bankrupt system a patina of legal respectability. In other words, economics was never separable from “identity politics,” certainly not in colonial nations like the United States—so why would it suddenly be today?”
― Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

“And there has been no more effective way to convince white voters to support the defunding of schools, bus systems, and welfare than by telling them (however wrongly) that most of the beneficiaries of those services are darker-skinned people, many of them “illegal,” out”
― Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

“Parents sacrifice their lives for their children. Then children become parents and sacrifice their own lives. And so all is sacrificed and nothing is gained. Life, then becomes the pursuit of an unobtainable purpose by absurd means.”
― Tom King, The Vision, Vol. 2: Little Better Than a Beast

“To assert as truth that which has no meaning is the core mission of humanity.”
― Tom King, The Vision, Vol. 1: Little Worse Than a Man

“Taste, we assume, is innate, reflexive, immediate, involuntary, but we also speak of it as something to be acquired. It is a private, subjective matter, a badge of individual sovereignty, but at the same time a collectively held property, bundling us into clubs, cults, communities, and sociological stereotypes.”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth

“Anti-intellectualism is virtually our civic religion. "Critical thinking" may be a ubiquitous educational slogan—a vaguely defined skill we hope our children pick up on the way to adulthood—but the rewards for not using your intelligence are immediate and abundant.”
― A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

“Who knows what will come when quick-tongued men make ancient grievances rhyme with fresh desire for land and conquest?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant