How to Blow Up a Pipeline Quotes

“To say that the signals have fallen on the deaf ears of the ruling classes of this world would be an understatement. If these classes ever had any senses, they have lost them all. They are not perturbed by the smell from the blazing trees. They do not worry at the sight of islands sinking; they do not run from the roar of the approaching hurricanes; their fingers never need to touch the stalks from withered harvests; their mouths do not become sticky and dry after a day with nothing to drink. To appeal to their reason and common sense would evidently be futile.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“To say that the signals have fallen on the deaf ears of the ruling classes of the world, would be an understatement. If these classes ever had any senses, they have lost them all. They are not perturbed by the smell from the blazing trees. They do not worry at the sight of islands sinking; they do not run from the roar of the approaching hurricanes; their fingers never need to touch the stocks from withered harvests; their mouths do not become sticky and dry after a day with nothing to drink. To appeal to their reason and common sense would evidently be futile. The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time. After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it; of their own accord, under their inner compulsion, they can do nothing but burn their way to the end.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Militancy was at the core of suffragette identity: ‘To be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation’, Pankhurst lectured. ‘It is a duty which every woman will owe her own conscience and self-respect, to women who are less fortunate than she is herself, and to all who are to come after her.’ The latest full-body portrait of the movement, Diane Atkinson’s Rise Up, Women!, gives an encyclopaedic listing of militant actions: suffragettes forcing the prime minister out of his car and dousing him with pepper, hurling a stone at the fanlight above Winston Churchill’s door, setting upon statues and paintings with hammers and axes, planting bombs on sites along the routes of royal visits, fighting policemen with staves, charging against hostile politicians with dogwhips, breaking the windows in prison cells. Such deeds went hand in hand with mass mobilisation. The suffragettes put up mammoth rallies, ran their own presses, went on hunger strikes: deploying the gamut of non-violent and militant action. After the hope of attaining the vote by constitutional means was dashed once more in early 1913, the movement switched gears. In a systematic campaign of arson, the suffragettes set fire to or blew up villas, tea pavilions, boathouses, hotels, haystacks, churches, post offices, aqueducts, theatres and a liberal range of other targets around the country. Over the course of a year and a half, the WSPU claimed responsibility for 337 such attacks. Few culprits were apprehended.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Precisely the hopelessness of the situation constituted the nobility of this resistance.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“In the ghettos, as in the extermination camps to which they were the antechamber, the résistants embarked on a race against death. To struggle and resist was the only lucid choice, but this most often meant for the fighters no more than choosing the time and manner of their death. Beyond the immediate outcome of the struggle, which most often was inevitable, their combat was for history, for memory”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Not only do the rich make our lives miserable, they are working to terminate the lives of multitudes.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Martin Luther King – his moral compass a wonder of reliability next to Gandhi’s – endorsed this distinction in his apologia for the urban riots of 1967: ‘Violent they certainly were. But the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people’,”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“If we cannot even get rid of the most preposterously unnecessary emissions, how are we going to begin moving towards zero?”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“People don’t need yachts – they want yachts’, in the words of a CEO of a top superyacht manufacturer.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“some exercise of the imagination might allow activists to neutralise CO2-emitting devices with easily accessed means.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Property destruction was a particularly distressing prospect. If the cities burned, ‘the white man’s companies will have to take the losses’, whined one close adviser to Kennedy and Johnson.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Disease, in the Gandhian view, results from impurity and must be allowed to do its cleansing work, and the same goes for extreme weather and earthquakes: with unusual consistency, the mahatma preached that victims of such events had it coming.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Talk! Talk! Talk!’ he exclaimed after yet another convention of a pacifist abolitionist society. ‘That will never free the slaves! What is needed is action – action.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“The anti-slavery movement only took off once white people in Europe and America began to see people of African descent not as property but as people.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Isn’t suffering unearned by the victims precisely what is so morally repugnant about the unfolding crisis? If so, why make it a virtue?”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Texas and the prolific Permian Basin is the epicentre of the development of new pipelines’,”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“And then there are the events of more recent history, beginning with the victory over apartheid, an analogy particularly popular in conjunction with divestment. ‘Just as apartheid was the moral issue’ of the late twentieth century, ‘climate change is the moral issue of our time’, McKibben has said, alluding to suffering in non-white peripheries of the world, and ‘the same kind of tactic is what’s necessary to face it’.”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

“Do we conclude that the only thing left is learning to die – a position already propounded by some – and slide down the side of the crater into three, four, eight degrees of warming? Or is there another phase, beyond peaceful protest?”
― Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline