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Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons.

Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy
Age: 62
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
Wars
Reasons
War
Reason
Never
Altruistic
Altruism
Fought

More quotes by Arundhati Roy

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Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.
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The revolution cannot be funded. It's not the imagination of trusts and foundations that's going to bring real change.
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Poverty is a crime and the poor are terrorists
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So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the massacre of innocent people or, if you like, a clash of civilisations and collateral damage. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice.
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Three-quarters of India lives on the edge of the market economy. You can't tell them that only those who can afford water can have it.
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I don't have the Big Idea. I don't have the arrogance to even want to have the Big Idea. But I believe the physics of resisting power is as old as the physics of accumulating power. That's what keeps the balance in the universe... the refusal to obey.
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Once you've seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something.
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the truth is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people.
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Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
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But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?
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Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
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You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.
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Mao said he was prepared to have millions of Chinese people perish in a nuclear war as long as China survived... I'm beginning to find it more and more sick that only humans make it into our calculations... Annihilate life on earth, but save the nation... what's the subject heading? Stupidity or Insanity?
Arundhati Roy
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It's so frightening, the nationalism in the air.
Arundhati Roy
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The genocide will not necessarily take the form of war, or death camps. Most likely it will take the form of ecocide, in which landscapes are devastated and the populations that live there slowly starve or turn upon each other savagely because there isn't enough food or water to go around.
Arundhati Roy
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The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government's policies, that are so hated.
Arundhati Roy
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As a writer, I've often said that, among the other things that we need to reclaim, other than the obscene wealth of billionaires, is language. Language has been deployed to mean the exact opposite of what it really means when they talk about democracy or freedom.
Arundhati Roy
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Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.
Arundhati Roy
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The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead.
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Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?
Arundhati Roy