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Snowden is the thoughtful, courageous saint of liberal reform. And Julian Assange is a sort of radical, feral prophet who has been prowling this wilderness since he was 16 years old.

Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
Reform
Feral
Radical
Prowling
Saint
Julian
Sort
Courageous
Since
Thoughtful
Years
Prophet
Wilderness
Liberal

More quotes by Arundhati Roy

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Poverty is a crime and the poor are terrorists
Arundhati Roy
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See, ma'am, frankly speaking this problem can't be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don't understand greed. Unless they become greedy there's no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.
Arundhati Roy
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But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?
Arundhati Roy
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In India the new government - the members of the radical Hindu Right who want India to be a 'Hindu Nation' - they're bigots. Butchers. Massacres are their unofficial election campaigns - orchestrated to polarise communities and bring in the vote.
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
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The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes.
Arundhati Roy
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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.
Arundhati Roy
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The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don't own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media.
Arundhati Roy
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At some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
Arundhati Roy
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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
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I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.
Arundhati Roy
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Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening
Arundhati Roy
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The writer is the midwife of understanding.
Arundhati Roy
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Excitement always leads to tears.
Arundhati Roy
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What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain...To contemplate its girth and its circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible. The only way to combat it is by fighting specific wars in specific ways.
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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It's OK just to be a writer, who writes about the society in which he lives and the issues that most important. Now how can that not be a writer, it always was. It's just recently that writers have been reduced to these playthings of the market.
Arundhati Roy
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By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.
Arundhati Roy
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When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.
Arundhati Roy
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It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their whole-hearted commitment to life.
Arundhati Roy