Ajey N

“Got to make a living' is a rationalization we tell ourselves to do things without integrity.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” The most widely accepted view of history is also the most childish. History is seen as the doings of Great Men (and occasionally Great Women), of kings and politicians, generals and churchmen, artists and film stars. Such a conception of history can be traced back to the medieval chroniclers, who recorded the doings of monarchs and noblemen, their feasts, wars and adulteries. We are still served up with the same view, by courtesy of the most advanced technology, on the television screen and in the headlines of the daily tabloids.”
― Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx

“We cannot prove that privileged owe something to the rest, any more than we can prove that theft is wrong.”
― Jean Drèze, Sense And Solidarity - Jholawala Economics for Everyone

“[Feminist] movement had given the culture the phrase “the personal is political,” credited to this passage from Carol Hanisch: “Personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.” It was an important and fruitful idea in February 1969. It helped people to see that things that happened in the quiet of personal life, and yet happened over and over again at the scale of the system, and happened because of forces that no individual was powerful enough to counteract alone—that these things had to be seen as and acted on politically, grandly, holistically, and, above all, in the places where the power was. A man beating a woman wasn’t just one man beating one woman; he was part of a system of male supremacy and laws and a culture of looking away that put the problem beyond solution by the woman in question. The shame one felt in getting an abortion wasn’t a feeling cooked up by the feeler; it was engineered and constructed through public policy and the artful use of religious authority. The feminists helped us to see problems in this way.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World