saar > saar's Quotes

“Never fuck anyone you wouldn't want to be.”
― Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
― Audre Lorde

“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.”
― Desmond Tutu (Foreword)

“When you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about or if you went away.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“it is outrageous that the law appears deliberately incomprehensible to those who need to understand it most.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“Justice? -You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”
― William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own

“I'm not afraid of God. I'm afraid of man.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“I don’t like the word “hero.” There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won’t be able to.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“I believe that in each of us there is a small piece of history. In one half a page, in another two or three. Together we write the book of time. We each call out our own truth. The nightmare of nuances.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, War's Unwomanly Face

“Although the science is still new and there is a lot to be learned, it is unacceptable for you to stay in the dark any longer. We know too much for you to know so little.”
― Sarah E. Hill, This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences

“There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.”
― Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Peace in patriarchy is war against women.”
― Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour

“What kind of moron wants to be a gladiator?”
― Kate Quinn, Mistress of Rome

“Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.”
― Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

“to those used to a certain kind of privilege, equality can feel like oppression.”
― Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe

“I believe the role of the writer is to tell society what it pretends it does not know.”
― Mariam Khan, It's Not About the Burqa

“I’m angry that we’ve been taught to swallow our pain to save you.”
― Lilly Dancyger, Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger

“Imagine this: A world where the quality of your life is not determined by how much money you have. You do not have to sell your labour to survive. Labour is not tied to capitalism, profit or wage. Borders do not exist; we are free to move without consequence. The nuclear family does not exist; children are raised collectively; reproduction takes on new meanings. In this world, the way we carry out dull domestic labour is transformed and nobody is forced to rely on their partner economically to survive. The principles of transformative justice are used to rectify harm. Critical and comprehensive sex education exists for all from an early age. We are liberated from the gender binary’s strangling grip and the demands it places on our bodies. Sex work does not exist because work does not exist. Education and transport are free, from cradle to grave. We are forced to reckon with and rectify histories of imperialism, colonial exploitation, and warfare collectively. We have freedom to, not just freedom from. Specialist mental health services and community care are integral to our societies. There is no “state” as we know it; nobody dies in “suspicious circumstances” at its hands; no person has to navigate sexism, racism, ableism or homophobia to survive. Detention centres do not exist. Prisons do not exist, nor do the police. The military and their weapons are disbanded across nations. Resources are reorganised to adequately address climate catastrophe. No person is without a home or loving community. We love one another, without possession or exploitation or extraction. We all have enough to eat well due to redistribution of wealth and resource. We all have the means and the environment to make art, if we so wish. All cultural gatekeepers are destroyed. Now imagine this vision not as utopian, but as something well within our reach.”
― Lola Olufemi, Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”
― Angela Davis

“Is there no way out of the mind?”
― Sylvia Plath

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“The situation is like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they'd like to put us to work rebuilding it, and -- to add insult to injury -- at a profit.”
― The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.
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― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“It's been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.”
― Oscar Wilde