The Committed Quotes

“What reeducation had taught me was that dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity. No, thank you. Don't you see that's how Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank., but through this infectious disease called the American Dream?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Seeing the failures of both comunism and anticomunism, I chose nothing, a synthesis that neither capitalists nor communists could understand. You may think that I'm being a nihilist, but you could not be more wrong. While nihilists thought life was meaningless and rejected all religious and moral principles, I still believed in the principle of revolution. I also believed that nothing was full of meaning - in short, that nothing was actually something. Wasn't that a kind of revolution in itself?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace,”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“But the only revolution you can commit to is the one that lets you laugh and laugh and laugh, because the downfall of every revolution is when it loses its sense of absurdity. This, too, is the dialectic, to take the revolution seriously but not to take the revolutionaries seriously, for when revolutionaries take themselves too seriously, they cock their guns at the crack of a joke. Once that happens, it’s all over, the revolutionaries have become the state, the state has become repressive, and the bullets, once used against the oppressor in the name of the people, will be used against the people in their own name. That is why the people, if they wish to survive and to dodge those bullets, must be nameless.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“You are upset because I made you see yourself. You like to think of yourself as just a man, not a white man, unless you call yourself white, with a certain kind of self-aware irony. But for me to call you a white man is unacceptable, downright racist, even if you yourself and all white people routinely say of someone “an Asiatic woman” or “a black man,” as if a black man were not just a man as you are just a man. So what if I noticed your whiteness—how unforgivable!”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but even average Frenchmen and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Ah, contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity! No one was spared, not even the Americans or the Vietnamese, who bathed daily, or the French, who bathed less than daily.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Neither my homeland nor America could ever be described as charming. It was too moderate of an adjective for a country and a people as hot and hot-blooded as mine. We repulsed or seduced, but we never charmed. As for America, just think of Coca-Cola. That elixir is really something, embodying as it does the addictive, teeth-decaying sweetness of a capitalism that was no good for you no matter how it fizzled on the tongue.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Organized religion was the first and greatest protection racket, an economy of perpetual profit built on voluntary fear and coerced guilt. Donating money to churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, cults, et cetera, to help ensure a spot for one’s soul in the express elevator to that penthouse in the sky known as the afterlife was marketing genius! Had Sleepy paid his spiritual insurance? If so, had it done him any good? According to Shorty, whose memory had been beaten into the consistency of oatmeal by a length of pipe, or so said Bon, a quartet of Arab youth had set on them.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“while the northerners offered a utopia that could be found nowhere, the southerners had created a Fantasia that could be experienced everywhere”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“The American Dream was so simple and so optimistic that it required no psychoanalysis, no deep sea-diving. It was as shallow, boring, and sentimental as a bad television show that had somehow become a hit.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“[I]t was not just capitalism that created fantasies through these Ideological State Apparatus and enforced them through Repressive State Apparatuses--so did communism.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“... even if staging a culture show was really an acknowledgement of one's cultural inferiority. The truly powerful rarely needed to put on a show, since their culture was always everywhere. Americans knew their culture was ubiquitous, whether burgers or bombs.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Yes, I am flawed, we are all flawed, even you, but I blame my flaws on the fact that all my life I only ever aspired to one thing—to be human. That was my first mistake, since I was already human, a fact not always recognized by others.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“the word of Sartre, writing on Fanon, is:
"With us,
to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism, since all of us without
exception have profited by colonial exploitation." Or to put it in my own
words: Whitewashing the blood-soaked profits of colonization was the
only kind of laundering white men did with their own hands.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“The workers of the world have to see that capitalism is only interested in profit, not them, and that it will inevitably reduce them to slave labor as it maximizes profit.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Nothing to do with black markets, or blackface, or how the French, in a really wonderful turn of phrase, call ghostwriters nègres—niggers!—the sheer bravado of it taking your breath away when you heard it for the first time. But why take offense over a playful use of words, when it really was the case that ghostwriters were just slaves, minus the whipping, raping, lynching, lifetime servitude, and free labor? Still—what the hell?—if words are just words, then let’s call it a white comedy, shall we? It’s just a joke, take it easy, a bad joke, sure, but so was the Unholy Trinity of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, not to mention the Dynamic Duo of capitalism and communism, both of which white people invented and which were contagious, like smallpox and syphilis.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“He was attired like an asshole, which is to say that he wore the long black tails, gray slacks, and top hat of an English gentleman or a nineteenth-century European nobleman, their refined manners and exquisite fashions suiting them perfectly for overseeing genocidal empires that looted nonwhite countries, enslaving and/or massacring their inhabitants, and sanctifying the results with the name “civilization.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“And even if we are inscrutable, what does that make white people? Are white people ever referred to as inscrutable? No, you would say that a white person who is hard to read has a poker face, which has a positive connotation, a strategic one, suggesting a careful withholding of information, whereas we are just inscrutable because you white people believe that we always have something to hide”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“And we all swooned, just a little, and dreamed that one day we, too, could board a steamer ship for the metropole with nothing more than a suitcase, a scholarship, and an inferiority complex.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Colonies were a pearl choker adorning the alabaster-white neck of the colonizer”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“We were the unwanted, the unneeded, and the unseen, invisible to all but ourselves.

And you are so happy you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Colonization is pedophilia. The paternal country rapes and molests its unfortunate pupils, all in the holy and hypocritical name of the civilizing mission.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Ah contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity!”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“If I’m unreadable—if all these Asians you refer to are unreadable—perhaps we are only unreadable to those who do not know how to read. Semantics—”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Nations, without exception, disposed of body parts all the time. How could we bear ourselves otherwise if not for the mass graves of our forgetting?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed

“Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed