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People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead.

Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
People
Winning
Rarely
Shrink
Use
Wars
Wrap
War
Killed
Bury
Thought
Minds
Wraps
Regroup
Government
Lose
Shrinks
Hydra
Firsts
Dead
Headed
Ceremonial
First
Willing
Flags
Smother
Mind
Loses
Governments
Shrouds

More quotes by Arundhati Roy

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Capitalism’s real “grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises-War and Shopping-simply will not work.
Arundhati Roy
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Every strategy for real social change - land reform, education, public health, the equitable distribution of natural resources ... - has been cleverly, cunningly, and consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes and that class of people which has a stranglehold on the political process.
Arundhati Roy
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India has millions of internally displaced people. And now, they are putting their bodies on the line and fighting back. They are being killed and imprisoned in their thousands. Theirs is a battle of the imagination, a battle for the redefinition of the meaning of civilisation, of the meaning of happiness, of the meaning of fulfilment.
Arundhati Roy
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I stand by what I write and follow through on what I write.
Arundhati Roy
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To annihilate indigenous populations eventually paves the way to our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. We think they are relics of the past, but they may be the gatekeepers to our future.
Arundhati Roy
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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.
Arundhati Roy
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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.
Arundhati Roy
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The U.S. corporate media, otherwise known as the free press, is that hollow pillar on which contemporary American democracy rests.
Arundhati Roy
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I don't think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost.
Arundhati Roy
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It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used.
Arundhati Roy
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One beach-colored. One brown. One Loved. One Loved a Little Less.
Arundhati Roy
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It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened
Arundhati Roy
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States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence - so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only - or well that's excessive - usually, the resistance.
Arundhati Roy
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He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.
Arundhati Roy
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If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.
Arundhati Roy
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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.
Arundhati Roy
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I am a woman who is a granddaughter of a lady who used to be beaten on the head by her husband, of a mother who went through hell because she was divorced and had to bring up these kids. And I can take 10 men out to lunch and pay the bill, and nobody even thinks twice about it. So don’t mess with me.
Arundhati Roy
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Today, the Indian government is trying to present privatization as the alternative to the state, to public enterprise. But privatization is only a further evolution of the centralized state, where the state says that they have the right to give the entire power production in Maharashtra to Enron.
Arundhati Roy
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Dams are the temples of secular India and almost worshipped. They are huge, wet cement flags that wave in our minds. They're the symbol of nationalism to many.
Arundhati Roy
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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.
Arundhati Roy