Hanan Ashrawi Quotes

The loudest voice in the room, sometimes, is the absent voice of the silenced.

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

I can hear the roar of women's silence.

Oppression doesn't disappear just because you decided not to teach us that chapter.

I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

An understanding of Sor Juana's work must include an understanding of the prohibitions her work confronts. Her speech leads us to what cannot be said, what cannot be said to an orthodoxy, the orthodoxy to a tribunal, and the tribunal to a sentence.

There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people.

I'm not a fan of identity politics.

Truth is on the side of the oppressed.

Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.

Why talk now when so many things have been said without ever giving me a chance to talk?

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

I think the world of 'District 9' has a lot of race and oppression-based ideas that I would still like to explore in that world.

Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.

Unless you've been touched personally, it's difficult to see, but there are millions of people who have no voice whatsoever.

The tensions between authority and the people need to be heard, especially when they are suffering and they can't eat.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

Too often a story is examined through biased eyes, without a sensitivity for everyone who forged it. It's seen from the point of view of the great white savior, and rarely is the perspective of the slave a part.

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

Each one of our ideas should benefit the people with less power than us.

Justice often means taking power from some who have it and giving it to some who do not.

Whenever there are enclosing walls, there are abuses behind them.