Sarah W

“Oppression, she told us, has the same face everywhere.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“In any other revolution, there would have been oppressed and oppressors, winners and losers, victims and perpetrators. Here, the chain of responsibility was so intricate that there could be only one camp. Executing leaders, imprisoning spies or sanctioning former Party members, would have fuelled the conflicts even further, sharpening the desire for revenge, spilling more blood. It seemed more sensible to erase responsibility altogether, to pretend everyone had been innocent all along. The only wrongdoers it was legitimate to name were those who had already died; those who could neither explain nor absolve themselves. All the rest turned into victims. All the survivors were winners. With no perpetrators, only ideas were left to blame. Communism was considered a vision so hopeless for some, so murderous for others, that the sole mention of the word would be met with either scorn or hatred. This revolution, the velvet one, was a revolution of people against concepts.”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

“In the tech arms race women and children are collateral damage. Boundaries are trumped by servitude to profits.”
― Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny

“The fact that the Party could break up and multiply like that, that it could be considered both the cure and the disease, both the root of all evil and the source of all hope, gave it a mythical quality that would be considered for many years to come the cause of all misfortune, a dark spell cast to make freedom look like tyranny, and to give necessity the semblance of choice. Setting yourself free from its all-encompassing presence was like chewing on the rope you suddenly noticed between your teeth. The Party had gone, but it was still there. The Party was above us, but it was also deep inside. Everyone, everything, came from it. Its voice had changed, it had acquired a different shape and spoke a new language. But what was the colour of its soul? Had it ever become what it was always meant to be?”
― Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History