Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

I think the American people said, look, you know, we can't control what every government does to its people, but we shouldn't be aiding and assisting a government in having these kinds of repressive prisons. It added to the public outcry against our involvement in Vietnam.

No football practice today. Go think about our president.

I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.

People on the right say to people like me, Oh, you hate America. And I always say, No, I love America. I want it back. I don't want you representing it. I don't want torture representing it. If I hated it, I'd be okay with being represented by the torturers.

I was born in the United States, I'm proud to be an American, I'm an American first. But obviously, I'm a Chinese-American. And growing up, my family, my parents, and I think rightly so didn't put us in Chinatown, didn't put us with our other ethnic group, but put us in mainstream America. They're thinking was that will help us assimilate into the mainstream and be a part of it. And it did. It certainly gave me tolerance of other people, of other races, of other ethnicities and I think that's helped make me a better person.

Apathy is a rational reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the vast majority of people.

The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal, he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him: it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does.

I don't really identify with America, I don't really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don't really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don't. All the definitions are there, but I don't really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.

The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people ... have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me?

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

I can tell you one thing: It doesn't matter what the American people think. There's going to be an awful lot more body bags.

Those of us who finally saw through the Vietnam war saw through this war, and all the actions that were necessary to end the Vietnam war will be necessary here. I think the American people will get us out of this war.

If people wake up, think critically, and get angry, we get connected to that courage that the founding generation meant us to have. History shows when millions just don't go along, resist at any level - and I'm talking about all the way up to bipartisan impeachment and arrest of the leaders of the coup - then it can't happen.

I don't think we live in a place where we don't want people to be able to say when they disagree with the president or incoming administration.

When people think you are speaking against them as a group, they try to shut it down out here.

Why is it when we have 10 million people in this country who say 'No', we still have a president who says 'Yes.' In a democracy, something's wrong here.

The ban is completely out of my hands. And I think in most people's minds, even if it's unrealistic to them, it's one that I left myself with no choice on.

Thinking that other people might be better than you is what makes you Canadian, not American.

I don't think a lot of people in America understand what Indians are. And that's our fault, a little. We tend to forget our roots a bit. As kids we think, If I'm too Indian, I'll be put in a box, and people will think of me as different. They'll think I'm weird, because I eat Indian food or my name is difficult to pronounce.

I think that revolution means change. And if somebody feels like there's nothing wrong, everything's great even when it ain't, why would they ask for a revolution? Just stick the tubes into me and just pump away.

The president has an obligation to serve all the people of America.

When my sixth grade teacher opened the class with subtle praise for the guardsmen shooting four people to death at Kent State, I'd given up arguing with her by that point. But I was very riled up inside and vowed that I would never forget that.

I don't consider myself a racist, I don't hate other peoples, but I certainly want to preserve my own. And I think that's true of all people.

There is a growing sense in America that being disconnected is not good. And there's also some people that are staying in their silos and not coming out, but we have to pull them out, and we have to pull ourselves together at some point, I think.

I am, it seems, interested in people with multiple identities. I think we all have multiple identities.