Arundhati Roy Quotes

There was no simple riddance to the power of a dangerous political idea; no assassination possible to avert a disruptive change in technology; no natural death to be counted on to stop an economic change that ripped up ancestral estates or stirred up class discontent.

The failure of the Russian Socialist Republic will be the defeat of the proletariat of the whole world.

There are those who simply want to live their lives, and feel they cannot live the way they want to in Iran. Others are ideologically motivated: They will stay no matter what and try to change things.

A populist is someone who sees politics from an economic perspective rather than an ideological perspective. I’m a populist. The only thing that really matters is who is gets screwed and who is doing the screwing.

The revolution in Russia was terrible for the proletariat in the long years of its development- and it is terrible now.

‎The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.

I think it may be even a bigger story than the internet. You know, it's like saying, 'how big a deal is the internet?' The Chinese middle-class is going to change the world.

Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement.

As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game.

There's a false choice being put forward by some Democrats now. Either we double-down on our progressive values, or we go out there and talk about the middle class and the working class. I've never found them inconsistent. They go together.

The brutality of communism was quickly swept under history's rug, in large part because so many on the left had embraced it as the solution to humankind's problems.

Though Stalinism may have been a needless tragedy for both the Russian people and communism as an ideal, there is the intellectually tantalizing possibility that for the world at large it was, as we shall see, a blessing in disguise.

Donald Trump, when he gives his speeches, talks like a populist. And he talks to middle class and working America and poor people. But when he governs, at least in his first 40 days, he governs like a hard-right guy.

In England, there are only two things to be, basically: You are either for the labor movement or for the capitalist movement. Either you become a right-wing Archie Bunker if you are in the class I am in, or you become an instinctive socialist, which I was.

The working class must break up, smash the "ready-made state machinery," and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.

Who's the big government guy? These labels are nonsense. And the Tea Party, if you want to call them working class, you know, a working-class insurgency from below, they are a mass of contradictions; they don't have a single consistent viewpoint; but part of their impulse is to be wary of government.

The Democratic party is one that I've always observed. I have struggled greatly in life from the day I was born and I am honored to be apart of something that focuses on working class citizens and molds them into a proud specimen. Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Kennedy have done so much in that regard for the two generations they've won over during their career course.

The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy's cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this.

I think Hillary [Clinton] has [woken up to the plight of the middle class] and is working toward it in a democratic process.

Donald Trump is pulling off a world-class scam here. I mean, he's telling people he's all these things that he's never been his entire life. He says he's fighting for the little guy, the working class. He has spent his entire business career sticking it to working people.

My mom and my grandmother definitely were (Democrat supporters). It wasn't a sense that, "Well, we vote for Democrats no matter what," but it was sort of the sense that, "Democrats are typically the ones that are looking out for working people like us."

The essence of fascism is to make laws forbidding everything and then enforce them selectively against your enemies.

The notion of democracy beginning to emerge scares the ideologues, the totalitarians, those who want to impose their vision. It just frightens them.

That's what the left is always doing. They have an ideal, and they want people to conform to it. When people don't conform to it, they end up being beaten into the mold. And beaten sometimes hard enough so that if they don't fit, then they kill them. That's what happened in the Soviet Union and China.

The most important word in the language of the working class is "solidarity."