Arundhati Roy Quotes

A war still rages over the legacy of the 1960s.

The idea of protest organizing, as summarized by community organizer Saul Alinsky, is that if we put enough pressure on the government, it will do things to help people. We don't realize that that kind of organizing worked only when the government was very strong, when the West ruled the world, relatively speaking. But with globalization and the weakening of the nation-state, that kind of organizing doesn't work.

When that devil's bullet lodged itself inside the body of Martin Luther King, he had already begun an astonishing mobilization of poor, Black, white, latino Americans who had nothing to lose. They would challenge our government to eliminate exploitative, merciless, and war-mongering policies, nationwide, or else "tie up the country" through "means of civil disobedience." Dr. King intended to organize those legions into "coercive direct actions" that would make of Babylon a dysfunctional behemoth begging for relief. Is it any wonder he was killed?

If you can't bear what's happening to the natural world, if you can't bear the way we treat each other; if you can't bear wars, you just can't bear the whole idea of war, which is possibly unavoidable. But still, you resist it. Because you just hate our treating each other that way and causing that suffering.

As we come to know the seriousness of the situation, the war, the racism, the poverty in our world, we come to realize that things will not be changed simply by words or demonstrations. Rather, it's a question of living one's life in a drastically different way.

change starts at the bottom. I think we're disempowered by the idea that it starts at the top, when really change is like a tree. It does start at the bottom.

We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war.

I've worked for four presidents, and I've concluded that almost nothing is inevitable. History is to a significant extent the result of the interaction of personalities and ideas. And so I don't believe war between the U.S. and China is in any way inevitable, and it's well within the province of diplomacy and statecraft to avoid it.

What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.

I am totally against the war but violence is part of mankind and it's going to happen, but as musicians I think we've got to step up and say 'come on'.

We are living in a time of many wars. The call for peace must be shouted. Peace sometimes gives the impression of being quiet, but it is never quiet. Peace if always proactive and dynamic.

Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable.

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

I joined the party because I was a revolutionary, not because of any ideological nonsense.

I don't accept armed struggle. Maybe it was the way in the '50s and '60s, but we want a democratic revolution.

If the government or the parties won't address our needs, we will. It's about direct action, even civil disobedience.

Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.

Try to reject war and give peace a chance. Question the powers that be and find out why they make the dubious decisions they do that send young people to war.

Violence is an admission that one's ideas and goals cannot prevail on their own merits.

Strikes and boycotting are akin to war, and can be justified only on grounds analogous to those which justify war, viz., intolerable injustice and oppression.

You can tell people of the need to struggle, but when the powerless start to see that they really can make a difference, nothing can quench the fire.

There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.

any peace movement must have behind it a higher passion than the desire for war.

And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars - all over Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose - there is no such war in the history of the race."

As they used to say 'What if they gave a war and nobody came?' How worthwhile if they declared a day of peace and everybody came.