Holly Williams

“But for the Count, his philosophical leanings had always been essentially meteorological. Specifically, he believed in the influence of clement and inclement weathers. He believed in the influence of early frosts and lingering summers, of ominous clouds and delicate rains, of fog and sunshine and snowfall. And he believed, most especially, in the reshaping of destinies by the slightest change in the thermometer.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Socialists have a big job ahead of them here. They have got to demonstrate, beyond possibility of doubt, just where the line of cleavage between exploiter and exploited comes. Once again it is a question of sticking to the essentials; and the essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk of 'capitalism' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“I discovered everywhere female automations created by men. There was nothing of ourselves, and the little there was that rose up in protest immediately became material for their manufacturing.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“As I pointed out, feudalism is essentially a redistributive system. Peasants and craftsmen produce things to a large extent autonomously; lords siphon off a share of what they produce, usually by dint of some complex set of legal rights and traditions ("direct-juro-political extraction" is the technical phrase I learned in college), and then go about portioning out shares of the loot to their own staff, flunkies, warriors, retainers - and to a lesser extent, by sponsoring feasts and festivals and by occasional gifts and favours, giving some of it back to the craftsmen and peasants once again. In such an arrangement, it makes little sense to speak of separate spheres of "politics" and "the economy" because the goods are extracted through political means and distributed for political purposes.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory