Thubten Palmo > Palmo's Quotes

“... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.”
― Judith Lewis Herman

“When a man starts my program, he often says, “I am here because I lose control of myself sometimes. I need to get a better grip.” I always correct him: "Your problem is not that you lose control of yourself, it’s that you take control of your partner. In order to change, you don’t need to gain control over yourself, you need to let go of control of her.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

“Disrespect also can take the form of idealizing you and putting you on a pedestal as a perfect woman or goddess, perhaps treating you like a piece of fine china. The man who worships you in this way is not seeing you; he is seeing his fantasy, and when you fail to live up to that image he may turn nasty. So there may not be much difference between the man who talks down to you and the one who elevates you; both are displaying a failure to respect you as a real human being and bode ill.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

“I want to throw up because we're supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I'm amazed we're not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

“It is exhausting living in a population where people don't speak up if what they witness doesn't directly threaten them.”
― David Wojnarowicz

“A number of months ago I read in the newspaper that there was a supreme court ruling which states that homosexuals in america have no constitutional rights against the government's invasion of their privacy. The paper states that homosexuality is traditionally condemned in america & only people who are heterosexual or married or who have families can expect those constitutional rights. There were no editorials. Nothing. Just flat cold type in the morning paper informing people of this. In most areas of the u.s.a it is possible to murder a man & when one is brought to trial, one has only to say that the victim was a queer & that he tried to touch you & the courts will set you free. When I read the newspaper article I felt something stirring in my hands; I felt a sensation like seeing oneself from miles above the earth or looking at one's reflection in a mirror through the wrong end of a telescope. Realizing that I have nothing left to lose in my actions I let my hands become weapons, my teeth become weapons, every bone & muscle & fiber & ounce of blood become weapons, & I feel prepared for the rest of my life.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

“When they invented the car they invented the collision and the darkness of what time leads the willing body to do.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

“History repeats itself. Someone says this.
History throws its shadow over beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.
history is the little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of,
I know history. There are many names in history... but none of them are ours.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Whatever your brilliance, your pessimism, your thoughts about existence, the answer is always... Life. It's not a dialectical idea, it's a lived contradiction. Gramsci said, 'We have to be pessimists in our thinking and optimists in our actions.”
― Agnes Varda, Agnes Varda: Interviews

“A lot of good men had been thinking for us. Marx did. Engels did. These people did beautifully. Yet maybe we need to get through Marx, for Marx doesn't give the keys and answers for us women.' If women must independently find their images, what of feminist-friendly men? 'If men want to join, leave the door open. They can listen,' Varda says.”
― Agnes Varda, Agnes Varda: Interviews

“As soon as you begin a film, and the idea begins to germinate, you enter into what I'd call a state of grace in your active relationship to chance. I can say that it's really chance and I that make the film together. (...) You know artists used to talk about inspiration and the muse. The muse! That's amusing! But it's not your muse, it's your relationship with the creative forces that makes things things appear when you need them. Those are the mysteries of my passion for the cinema.”
― Agnes Varda, Agnes Varda: Interviews

“They always want us to tell stories with action and psychological drama but there are other very interesting directions we can take in time, space, and memory. Emotions, recollections, surprises.”
― Agnes Varda, Agnes Varda: Interviews

“Stalin’s policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.”
― Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

“The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine. Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934, and especially the spike in the spring of 1933, were not caused directly by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger.”
― Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
― Arundhati Roy, War Talk

“I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.”
― Arundhati Roy

“I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.”
― Arundhati Roy

“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined. ”
― Arundhati Roy , The God of Small Things

“It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“I really worry about these political people that have no personal life. If there's nothing that's lovely, and if there's nothing that's just ephemeral, that you can just lie on the floor and bust a gut laughing at, then what's the point?”
― Arundhati Roy

“Never counted in the "costs" of war are the dead birds, the charred animals the murdered fish, incinerated insects, poisoned water sources, destroyed vegetation. Rarely mentioned is the arrogance of the human race toward other living things with which it shares this planet. All these are forgotten in the fight for markets and ideologies. This arrogance will probably be the ultimate undoing of the human species.”
― Arundhati Roy, War Talk

“The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination–an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain?”
― Arundhati Roy, Broken Republic: Three Essays

“How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production?”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“K H A D I J A S A Y S . . .
In Kashmir when we wake up and say ‘Good Morning’ what we really mean is ‘Good Mourning’.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“When you recreate the image of man, why repeat God's mistakes?”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. Its a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlist, will be honored and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers . . . The borders are open, folks! Come on in.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“…imagine that the earth—four thousand six hundred million years old—[were] a forty-six-year-old woman…. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old…when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five—just eight months ago—when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life…. It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought…that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge—was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Although you know that one day you will die, you live as if you won't.”
― Arundhati Roy

“It simply did not occur to her that she had hurt him as deeply as she had, because she still thought of herself as an ordinary woman, and him as an extraordinary man.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things