Elfriede Jelinek Quotes

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

It's a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done.

Often those who are denied rights are least empowered to bring about the changes they seek.

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.

No change can come if those who are impacted the most by discrimination are not willing to stand up for themselves.

I want to be the voice and the vision for the poor and the powerless.

There are people in our country, in our communities who are being marginalized and discriminated against every single day. I fight for them.

We must speak up for those who do not dare to speak, those who are not allowed to, and those who cannot.

Trans folk, especially of color, should not be obligated to help cis folk play catch-up on our experiences. The effort can detract from our work to protect and liberate ourselves.

Those that have a voice have to speak for those of us who are silenced.

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 feel that my purpose is to shed light on some of the darker sides of our world, and to lend a hand and a voice to people struggling.

I don't like to see people using their power over others, trying to hurt people who are weak or poor or people with darker skin or anyone who doesn't have as much privilege. It makes me so angry. I want to fight for people. I want to be able to make some kind of difference in the world.

Anywhere where the humanity of people is undermined, anywhere where people are left in the dust, there we will find our cause.

Homeboy Industries has chosen to stand with the 'demonized' so that the demonizing will stop; it stands with the 'disposable' so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.

Speaking out is important for me because everyone should be treated equally.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.

The most important thing my grandfather taught me was that the most noble way to use your skills, intellect and energy is to defend the marginalized against those with the greatest power - and that the resulting animosity from those in power is a badge of honor.

People have a right to have their lives witnessed; if we coexist with the systems that abuse people, then we have a duty to understand.

I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.

We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.

The cry of the oppressed has entered not only into my ears, but into my soul, so that while I live, I cannot hold my peace.

I'm a political poet - let us say a 'human' poet, a poet that's concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that's what I'm going to use.

I have lectured at the U.N. and travelled widely, giving lectures on human rights and gender inequalities in universities. But this is a life I do not wish to live. I don't want to be a showcase, I want to be in a battlefield where I can stand beside the oppressed and the poor.