The Bodies of Others Quotes

“He replied with something like, “I will keep going until we either win our freedoms back, or I am in a Gulag.” I understood. This is truly a time in history for the hammering out of heroes and heroines in the forge of crisis. And so it is also a time of cowardice, when those who choose collusion, when they know better, are allowing their souls to shrivel in that same heat.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“A lawyer who sought my business said this to me; so did people I scarcely knew whom I contacted for trivial information; so did a total stranger referred by a colleague, who smugly informed me over the phone that she was “double-vaxxed and boosted.” I always felt an internal grimace at these announcements. I did not want to hear about the birth-control choices, or the prostate treatments, or the hernia operations of the bodies of others. I did not need to see anyone’s medicine cabinet.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“We are relentlessly encouraged by tech companies to think of their technology as enabling human processes, making human actions more efficient. Do your bookkeeping better! Find a restaurant more easily! Talk to a loved one far away! In fact, the business models of most tech giants, and especially social media giants, most thrive when they have replaced human experience and human actions. And now they have moved on to suppressing human experience and human actions.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“It was bizarre to see the expectation that mothers-to-be must be “masked” as they were in labor. Everyone in the birthing community teaches the critical importance of breathing correctly, for safe births. That well-documented central belief was dropped by the right-on obstetric and doula community overnight.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“As a child, you sat in a circle around your teacher and looked at her face as she read a story, and you felt the magic of human narrative in a collective context.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“One of my favorite quotations is this, from the late poet Audre Lorde: “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” It is truer now more than ever. This is a dangerous moment indeed.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“It was the first responders who put their bodies in harm’s way for the safety of my colleagues and acquaintances. But when it came to it, when it came to protecting the bodies of first responders from coercion and harm, the “Zoom class” failed utterly to reciprocate with courage of their own. To say the least, in this time of testing, we have not all been equally brave.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“Early on in the pandemic, I asked a renowned medical-freedom activist how he stayed strong in his mission as his name was besmirched and he faced career attacks and social ostracism. He replied with Ephesians 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“In pandemic time, time had ceased to be linear. It was now always pandemic time. “The middle of a pandemic” kept shifting so that it had no actual chronological meaning. It was always the eternal now, the pandemic was always everywhere around us, with no recourse to objective metrics.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“The virus and the vaccine were just the stimuli. What had really been accomplished was the breaking of America.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“And even now, these elite justice advocates celebrated their own virtue, and the shared presumption of their superior morality, without seeming to notice that they had become — in less than a year — exactly what they had spent their adult lives professing most to hate.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“We had now left the Enlightenment and entered the world of “belief matrices.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“As we milled about before the meeting, I noticed the school had removed all the hallway lockers — “because of COVID.” What this meant in practice was that the students, whose bodies were still growing and developing, had to carry an entire locker’s worth of schoolbooks, seventy-plus pounds worth, in backpacks all day long.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“When you are living under emergency measures, by definition you no longer have a functioning democracy. I say these days, “the coup has already taken place.” What is stunning is how few people even now recognize the degree to which the country was living under dictatorial measures.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“The vaccine passport platform is the first step toward a social credit system, like the one in China that enslaves a billion people. In China, the CCP can find any dissident in five minutes because of the 360-degree surveillance of the social credit system.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“As CEO of a tech company, I knew exactly why a digital version was “necessary” and the ill that fact boded. I did all I could to warn people that it signaled the potential end of human liberty. In a video that went viral, I explained that digital as opposed to paper “vaccine passports” could require endless “updates” to stay valid. How did I know this? Because a digital product can be made to shut off.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“Your body is the credit card. It’s what you pay with. Vaccine passports are at the heart of the transition to a world where humans are at the mercy of Big Tech and a few oligarchs.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“Why develop policies that punish, encumber and restrict human contact in humane/analog (unsurveilled, unmediated) spaces? Because human contact is the great revolutionary force underlying human freedom.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“Driving all human interaction onto Zoom and other not-always secure platforms was not only a way to harvest all our data, it was a way to ensure (as face-to-face human connection withered and died) that what passes for intimacy and connection in the future will increasingly be online.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“I sent the letter to my loved ones and friends. Beginning to be completely devoted to a gathering narrative in which mRNA vaccination was “our way out of this” and the unvaccinated were stubborn disease factories to be ostracized, many friends and loved ones asked me not to send them anything of that nature again. These were judges, journalists, editors — critically thinking people.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“He showed me that the PCR tests in use for COVID could pick up evidence of weeks-old cold or flu in the nasal passages and misidentify it as “COVID-19.” He explained that many colds are “coronaviruses,” so I realized that a news outlet saying that 70,000 people had died of “coronavirus,” without further identification, could imply more than just deaths from COVID-19.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“And I wondered why there were no studies of communities that did not “lock down” — communities in which people chose their own levels of risk while providing support to those who wished to “isolate” or who wanted to protect their own, more vulnerable immune systems while others made different choices. I wondered why no one wanted to know what was becoming of them.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“So what were these “restrictions” really for? Why were they proliferating and shape shifting day by day and week by week? Gradually, it became clear. The true reason had nothing to do with medicine. The true reason is that, in the elites’ war against Western humanism, “restrictions” had become the weapon of choice.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“No matter how “right on” the upper-middle class was, no matter the social-justice proclamations of my former liberal, affluent urban “tribe,” no one really expressed any objection to this unequal distribution of risk and harm.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“The citizens of the United Kingdom did not, however, know this, for the most part. And much moralizing went along with this edict: those who followed “the rules” were lauded in the press; those who asked questions were derided as “COVID deniers” who wanted to “kill Grandma.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“We all heard about the fact that a field hospital was being set up in Central Park, and this news chilled us mightily. But we did not hear that it had been packed up a mere fifteen days later.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“As with “remote learning,” Zoom rolled out everywhere as a cultural expectation without question or variation. It wasn’t as if some businesses met or polled their workers or created a hybrid model — no, the social norm was established almost overnight. Everyone suddenly knew how to navigate it, and a whole Zoom culture appeared at once.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“It is not surprising that masks are so destabilizing to see, so unnerving. We see from expressions if we are among friendly people or people who are dangerous to us. Human beings need to see faces in order to feel safe.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“The everywhere-promoted “masking” quickly became a fetish. In all cultures and at all times, masks have represented de-individuation and dehumanization. Thieves wear masks. Executioners wear black masks so their victims cannot see them. Torturers are masked.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“Yet now, weirdly, in state after state, policies and media messages were promoting precisely the opposite. The message was not “Go to the park, go to the beach! Exercise! Open the windows! Get sun! Take Vitamin D!” but rather, “Stay Home! Bring the adult children home into crowded multigenerational households! Stay indoors, continually stressed with fear! Put a piece of fabric on your face!”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human