Arundhati Roy Quotes

151 Sourced Quotes

We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.

Arundhati Roy
When people say "the people" or "the public" as though it's the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.

Arundhati Roy
If you look at the history of the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller, in Latin America, in Indonesia, where almost a million people, mainly Communists, were killed by General Suharto, who was backed by the CIA, in South Africa, in the US Civil Rights Movement - or even now, it's very disturbing. They have always worked closely with the US State Department.

Arundhati Roy
Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there's the business of war.

Arundhati Roy
Anyway, what is a country? When people say, "Tell me about India," I say, "Which India?.... The land of poetry and mad rebellion? The one that produces haunting music and exquisite textiles? The one that invented the caste system and celebrates the genocide of Muslims and Sikhs and the lynching of Dalits? The country of dollar billionaires? Or the one in which 800 million live on less than half-a-dollar a day? Which India?"

Arundhati Roy
If you want to control somebody, support them. Or marry them.

Arundhati Roy
Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation.

Arundhati Roy
Your enemies are always manufactured to suit your purpose, right? How can you have a good enemy? You have to have an utterly evil enemy - and then the evilness has to progress.

Arundhati Roy
It's all a play. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happen, there are hundreds of thousands of dead, and the curtain comes down, and that's the end of that. Then Korea happens. Vietnam happens, all that happened in Latin America happens. And every now and then, this curtain comes down and history begins anew. New moralities and new indignations are manufactured...in a disappeared history.

Arundhati Roy
The only good thing about nuclear war is that it is the single most egalitarian idea that man has ever had. On the day of reckoning, you will not be asked to present your credentials. The devastation will be indiscriminate.

Arundhati Roy
Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India's richest people and redistribute it amongst 2 million of India's poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development?

Arundhati Roy
I could weep for a river-valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don't know...

Arundhati Roy
As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.

Arundhati Roy
Even capitalists must surely admit, that intellectually at least, socialism is a worthy opponent. It imparts intelligence even to its adversaries.

Arundhati Roy
The revolution cannot be funded. It's not the imagination of trusts and foundations that's going to bring real change.

Arundhati Roy
The idea of justice - even just dreaming of justice - is revolutionary. The language of human rights tends to accept a status quo that is intrinsically unjust - and then tries to make it more accountable.

Arundhati Roy
I can't be a part of the large convoy because it's not a choice that you can make. The fact that I'm an educated person means that I can't be on that convoy. I don't want to be on it. I don't want to be a victim. I don't want to disappear into the darkness.

Arundhati Roy
Thousands of years of ideological, philosophical and practical decisions were made. They altered the surface of the earth, the coordinates of our souls. For every one of those decisions, maybe there's another decision that could have been made, should have been made.

Arundhati Roy
When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported al-Qaeda. None of this opinion is based on evidence, because there isn't any.

Arundhati Roy
Human rights are fundamental rights, they are the minimum, the very least we demand. Too often, they become the goal itself. What should be the minimum becomes the maximum - all we are supposed to expect - but human rights aren't enough. The goal is, and must always be, justice.

Arundhati Roy
Human beings seem unable to live without war, but they are also unable to live without love.

Arundhati Roy
The Indian government has managed to turn the concept of nonviolence on its head. Nonviolent resistance and nonviolent governance. Unlike, say, China or Turkey or Indonesia, India doesn't mow down its people. It doesn't kill people who are refusing to move. It just waits it out. It continues to do what it has to do and ignores the consequences.

Arundhati Roy
Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It's over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don't.

Arundhati Roy
The truth is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people.

Arundhati Roy
Privatisation is presented as being the only alternative to an inefficient, corrupt state. In fact, it is not a choice at all... it is a mutually profitable business contract between the private company (preferably foreign) and the ruling elite of the Third World

Arundhati Roy
Cage the People, Free the Money. The only thing that is allowed to move freely - unimpeded - around the world today is money... capital.

Arundhati Roy
We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution.

Arundhati Roy
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
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.

Arundhati Roy
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