Doris Lessing Quotes

And finally, there is another danger: the emergence of nonideological but very aggressive 'isms,' which are really quite new. Let me at least name them: We all care about human rights, but I am afraid of 'human rightism.' We all want to have a healthy environment, but I see the danger in environmentalism. To put it politically correctly, I admire the second gender, but I fear feminism. We all are enriched by other cultures, but not by multiculturalism. I am aware of the importance of voluntary associations, but I fear NGOism.

Political correctness is neither political nor is it correct. It amounts to social censorship, and the sooner we spit it out, the better.

Political correctness is tyranny with manners.

Political correctness is a concept invented by hard-rightwing forces to defend their right to be racist, to treat women in a degrading way and to be truly vile about gay people. They invent this idea of people who are politically correct, with a rigid, monstrous attitude to life so they can attack. But we have all had to learn to modify our language. That's all part of being a decent human being.

Subversive language, however, must be constantly reinvented, because it is continually being co-opted by the powerful.

All movements go too far.

It's not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.

Whenever anyone challenges anything, the powers that be try to paint them as extremists or radicals or whatever. And I think that's actually nonsense.

Those powers that control the tent are not threatened at all by any activity that you engage in, in the shadows, that's not moving toward the tent. And I am rather convinced that we have a generation that is so preoccupied with life in the shadows, they never even focus on getting to the sunlight where you open up the big tent.

I have a distinct memory, dating back to 1989 or so, of sitting around with my college dorm mates talking about a new term that was popping up everywhere: 'political correctness.'

If women want any rights more than they's got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it.

Democratic rights develop when the ruled demand them and have the means to prevail.

Nothing could be less intelligent than to assume, as many respectable persons still manage to do, that the forms of agitation which are popularly summed up in the terms socialism, anarchism, feminism, and pacifism are mere eccentricities of unbalanced minds, seeking to cloak their hatred of restraint and their cowardice under theories of social regeneration.

Collective action is a means of power, a means by which individuals can more fully realize their individual values.

Everything I do is political.

Politics lives in people, ideas live in people, they live in the concrete struggles that people have.

The better we understand how identities and power work together from one context to another, the less likely our movements for change are to fracture.

I've always been interested in how things change, in social change. I was involved in the animal rights movement as a young woman, I've been involved in thinking about gender and issues around racism and so on.

What we've seen is an attempt by mainstream politics and politicians to co-opt movements that galvanize people in order for them to move closer to their own goals and objectives. We don't think that playing a corrupt game is going to bring change and make black lives matter.

Without compromise repression would be defeated. Just as some cancers feed on hormones, compromise becomes the hormone of oppression.

In a land of freedom we are held hostage by the tyranny of political correctness.

I have always defined political correctness as an elevation of sensitivity over truth.

We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.

The two pillars of 'political correctness' are, a) willful ignorance, and b) a steadfast refusal to face the truth.

Political correctness and so many of the political fashions of the day...could only be perpetrated in adolescent minds: minds, that is, that are trained to search out one thing and one thing only...Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses, the possibility of slights, real and imagined.