Arundhati Roy Quotes - Page 7

Humans are animals of habit.

When you think of how much violence, how much blood... how much has been destroyed to create the great nations, America, Australia, Britain, Germany, France, Belgium - even India, Pakistan. Having destroyed so much to make them, we must have nuclear weapons to protect them - and climate change to hold up their way of life... a two-pronged annihilation project.

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.

When she looked at him now, she couldn't help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.

Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.

The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.

I sometimes think I was perhaps the only girl in India whose mother said, "Whatever you do, don't get married". For me, when I see a bride, it gives me a rash. I find them ghoulish, almost.

An old-growth forest, a mountain range or a river valley is more important and certainly more loveable than any country will ever be.

The writer is the midwife of understanding.

I'm not somebody who plans my life. In fact, I don't know what's going to happen here in India, it's such a strange climate here at the moment. So very worrying.

Every time I say the word capitalism, everyone just assumes I have plenty of Marxism in me, I do. But Russia and China had their bloody revolutions and even while they were Communist, they had the same idea about generating wealth - tear it out of the bowels of the earth. And now they have come out with the same idea in the end... you know, capitalism. But capitalism will fail, too.

… he remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.

There was a time when the women of Afghanistan - at least in Kabul - were out there. They were allowed to study, they were doctors and surgeons, walking free, wearing what they wanted. That was when it was under Soviet occupation. Then the United States starts funding the mujahideen. Reagan called them Afghanistan's "founding fathers." It reincarnates the idea of "jehad," virtually creates the Taliban.

I actually did a quick survey of how caste plays out in contemporary India. The idea that democracy and development have in some ways eroded caste turned out not to be the case, that it has in fact been entrenched and modernised.

Indian intellectuals today feel radical when they condemn fundamentalism, but not many people are talking about the links between privatization, globalization, and fundamentalism.

In India, the poverty is so vast that the state cannot control it. It can beat people, but it can't prevent the poor from flooding the roads, the cities, the parks and railway station platforms.

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.

The religious rightwingism is directly linked to globalization and to privatization. When India is talking about selling its entire power sector to foreign multinationals, when the political climate gets too hot and uncomfortable, the government will immediately start saying, should we build a Hindu temple on the site of the Babri mosque? Everyone will go baying off in that direction. It's a game.

In Iraq, until before the war, the women were scientists, museum directors, doctors. I'm not valourising Saddam Hussein or the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which was brutal and killed hundreds of thousands of people - it was the Soviet Union's Vietnam. I'm just saying that now, in these new wars, whole countries have slipped into mayhem - the women have just been pushed back into their burqas - and not by choice.

When I'm outside the cities I do feel optimistic. There is such grandeur in India and so much beauty.

Iraq was only the latest in a succession of countries. Earlier, there was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Granada, Panama. But this time it wasn't just your ordinary brand of friendly neighborhood frenzy. It was frenzy with a purpose. It ushered in an old doctrine in a new bottle: the doctrine of preemptive strike, also known as the United States can do whatever the hell it wants, and that's official. The war against Iraq has been fought and won, and no weapons of mass destruction have been found, not even a little one.

With one hand, you're selling the country out to Western multinationals. And with the other, you want to defend your borders with nuclear bombs. It's such an irony! You're saying that the world is a global village, but then you want to spend crores of rupees on building nuclear weapons.

India's a very interesting place... there's no formal opposition, but there's genuine on-the-ground opposition.

And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.

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