Amitava Kumar Quotes

Those who are privileged have little regard for history.

We have been deformed by educational and religious institutions that treat us as members of an audience instead of actors in a drama, so we become adults who treat democracy as a spectator sport.

White supremacy is the conscious or unconscious belief or the investment in the inherent superiority of some, while others are believed to be innately inferior. And it doesn't demand the individual participation of the singular bigot. It is a machine operating in perpetuity, because it doesn't demand that somebody be in place driving.

The corporate right fires up the religious right against gay marriage and abortion and uses their votes to push their deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. It's an old trick. The House of Saud has the same arrangement with the Mullahs in Saudi Arabia.

People don't want to have to justify their privileges; they don't want to have to justify having access to the power and resource that wealth brings. And by not talking about it, they are able to hold onto their power without being questioned, and I think that makes them feel more secure.

A lot of positive psychology is stuck in being the psychology of privilege, and I reject that.

It is this power structure which the Radical Right in the United States has been attacking for years in the belief that they are attacking the Communists.

What the power structure is afraid of is that we're going to learn to recognize the truth when we hear it.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

Remember, social progress only happens when those in society's privileged classes choose to give up their status.

I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.

The citizen is becoming a pawn in a game where nobody knows the rules, where everybody consequently doubts that there are rules at all, and where the vocabulary has been diminished to such an extent that nobody is even sure what the game is all about.

See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.

The people don't run the system; the people are victims of the system. The people choose the leaders thinking that they will help them. But when they turn around, there is no help.

Those who suffer are not those at the top, but are the less privileged members of society.

History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.

We have long suspected that the faceless organisations that run our world - be it the church, multinational conglomerates or the government - keep things from us.

Progress is always relative: to the oppressed, it can only be viewed as an all or nothing deal - if oppression continues, even in a modified form, then the system must still be attacked until that injustice is eradicated.

When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority—whether religious, racial, genetic, ethnic, cultural, or institutional—rather than an accident of timing or geography.

Elites always tell poor people, “Work hard and play by the rules.”

The masses are absolutely being manipulated by those in power.

Who takes the blame: the leader who talks of poverty but lives in luxury, or the poor who choose a leader of that type?

Allow the rich (no matter under what pretext, whether of philanthropy, or patriotism, or interest) to prescribe the education of the poor, and they prescribe their condition and relative importance.