Precarity Quotes

“Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

“In other words, they appeal to the state for protection, but the state is precisely that from which they require protection. To be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state, so to rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is precisely to exchange one potential violence for another. There may, indeed, be few other choices.”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

“It’s not so terrible a feeling, aloneness, or it’s so terrible it’s mind-blowing. I’ve never felt so present as I do now, every second on the brink of life and death. No sense of space or scale. I picture myself as a tiny person teetering on the rim of a glass of milk. (I don’t know why milk, I don’t like milk – a drink from childhood, perhaps, when I felt powerless.) I could go either way: lose my footing, fall in and drown, or recover my balance and survive.”
― Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened

“Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

“After all, poor people are only as good as their last service to the masters of the system, and it is based on that last service that they get to have one more paycheck for just one more month of uncertainty.”
― Louis Yako

“There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.”
― invoking the words of economic historian R. H. Tawney, James C. Scott

“Precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized precariousness for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence who often have no other option than to appeal to the very state from which they need protection.”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

“There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.”
― James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia

“Some people choose their precarity - evidence that precarity is not just a condition of our time, but a response to it. The precariat includes people who have forgone stable employment and retirement savings for temp work and travel and an uncertain future. Their very existence is unsettling, suggesting, as it does, that there might be something worth more than security.”
― Eula Biss, Having and Being Had