Things that Can and Cannot Be Said Quotes

“We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution.”
― Arundhati Roy, Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations

“This discourse of human rights, it's a very good format for TV--the great atrocity analysis and condemnation industry. Who comes out smelling sweet in the atrocity analysis? States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence--so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? The resistance. ... Human rights take the history out of justice. ... 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. But then, of course, the catch-22 is that violating human rights is integral to the project of neoliberalism and global hegemony.”
― Arundhati Roy, Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations

“History is really a study of the future, not the past.”
― Arundhati Roy, Things That Can and Cannot be Said

“Peace, Inc., is sometimes as worrying and War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed, and we don't even know it. The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against "corruption" and for "transparency." They want the Rule of Law--as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardise a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment. Cage the People, Free the Money. The only thing that is allowed to move freely--unimpeded--around the world today is money, capital.”
― Arundhati Roy, Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations

“Now we're in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodelled to be market friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to install democracies. First is was topple them, now it's install them. And the whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility--it's all part of a New Managed Democracy. In a sense, it's all part of the same machine.”
― Arundhati Roy, Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations

“All we seem to be left with now is paranoid gibberish about a War on Terror whose whole purpose is to expand the War, increase the Terror, and obfuscate the fact that the wars of today are not aberrations but systemic, logical exercises to preserve a way of life whose delicate pleasures and exquisite comforts can only be delivered to the chosen few by a continuous, protracted war for hegemony--Lifestyle Wars.”
― Arundhati Roy, Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations

“Isn’t the greatness of great nations directly proportionate to their ability to be ruthless and genocidal? Doesn’t the height of a country’s "success" usually also mark the depths of its moral failure?”
― Arundhati Roy, Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations

“Isn’t the greatness of great nations directly proportionate to their ability to be ruthless and genocidal? Doesn’t the height of a country’s “success” usually also mark the depths of its moral failure?”
― Arundhati Roy, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said

“AR:... So many major activists had turned into travel agents, just having to organize tickets
and money, flying people up and down. The forum suddenly declared, “Only nonviolence, no armed struggles...”
They had turned Gandhian.

JC: So anyone involved in armed resistance...

AR: All out, all out. Many of the radical struggles were out. And I thought, fuck this. My question is, if let's say, there are people who live in villages deep in the forest, four days' walk from anywhere, and
a thousand soldiers arrive and burn their villages and kill and rape people to scare them off their land because mining companies want it—what brand of nonviolence would the stalwarts of the establishment recommend?”
― Arundhati Roy, Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations

“Thousands of years of ideological, philosophical, and practical decisions were made. They altered the surface of the earth, the coordinates of our souls. For every one of those decisions, maybe there's another decision that could have been made, should have been made.”
― Arundhati Roy, Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations

“At on level I am happy--awed--that there are people...that have defected from the state...but then there's part of me that thinks... How could you ever have believed in it? Is is possible to have a moral state? A moral superpower? I can't understand those people that believe the excesses are just aberrations ... Of course I understand it intellectually, but ... part of me wants to retain that incomprehension ...”
― Arundhati Roy, Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations