Women authors from South Africa

"If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank, history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly, threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas that is their life. For, having primed it, they do not know where to start, how to make a mark. They are alone in the world, a small new island of whiteness. Or so they think; they do not know, or perhaps they do not want to know, that the neighbourhood is full of people like them. Thus they are steeped in its silence."

"The newspapers were always full of stories about abandoned children found tied up or living under the bed because their families were ashamed of them on account of the colour of their skin."

"On the other hand, when I was at school, I remember kids in my class boasting about the members of their family who had 'turned white'."

"I was hot-headed, impatient, I just wanted to leave the whole oppressiveness of my own culture far behind."

"I have a ghost existence here: my whole intellectual and emotional life is in South Africa."

"I'm very, very contrary. And I want to be in control, which is what informs my attitude to publishing, editing, being interviewed. I set high standards too: as a reader, I don't read any poor novels, so I'm always aware of how much my own work falls flat by comparison. And perhaps it's because I grew up in South Africa, and it was easy there for people like me to grow up with a consciousness of inferiority."

"After several false starts, self-reflexivity offered a solution –– I decided to exploit my inability to write, to fictionalise the writer herself, and to make the actual writing of Pringle’s history the framework of the novel."

"Hinza Marossi, Pringle’s adopted son, was of interest from the outset. Not only is his story recorded in a poem, but I wanted to explore the question of interracial adoption under colonial conditions as well as what that story looks like from Hinza’s point of view."

"The character Mary Prince was an obvious choice because her slave narrative was the first by a woman. It was published in London by Pringle in spite of opposition and litigation by British people who benefitted from slavery. He was also reviled by fellow Scottish settlers at the Cape, who persisted with the myth that slavery in South Africa was an altogether more benign affair."

"Nicholas Greene, a character from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando (one of my favourite novels) is a more controversial choice, and really I don’t remember how he entered the story. But I was drawn to the fact that he is a time-traveller and to his fictionality as opposed to the other real historical figures. Thus he enabled me to address yet another level of the real within my fictional account. Given that the novel is about the writing of Pringle’s story, Greene also offered another version of the writer."

"I’m drawn to a subject, do the necessary research, and then the problem of how to represent that subject arises. A struggle of trying to write something that may or may not lead towards a solution, and really it’s a matter of faith, of believing that something will come out of the daily routine."

"There are periods of giving up on the project, then inexplicably I return to wrestle with my material until finally the first draft shapes itself through the process of writing. Then follows many more drafts, less torturous than the first, in which I straighten out events and try to refine the prose, but doubts about the value of what I’m doing persist ––I am after all not read by many; in fact, my readership is more or less limited to students of Postcolonial Writing."

"But, you can’t ever think of yourself as belonging in Europe. In terms then of an interior life, I remained South African, through teaching and writing about South Africa – both fiction and literary criticism. I returned for a few years and taught at UWC but then I couldn’t manage the family separation, and returned to Scotland."

"I imagined that when I retired from teaching, I would live mainly in South Africa, but in the meantime the promise of liberation has been hollowed out and I’m not attracted to the pathologies of historical colonialism that persist. Still, I do spend a couple of months every year in the Cape and return to the north with great reluctance."

"The world mistakes Palestinian military weakness for moral innocence."

"Incarcerating people for their [drug] consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder."

"From the fact that many libertarians believe that the state has no legitimacy, they arrive at the position that anything the state does is illegitimate. This is a logical confusion. Consider the murderer who happens on a scene of a rape while fleeing the law, saves the woman, and pounds the rapist. Is this good deed illegitimate because performed by a murderer?"

"A brave nation fights because it must; a cowardly nation fights because it can."

"“Sexual exhibitionism—homosexual or heterosexual—is anathema. The heroic and creative inner struggle of an older generation of Gay Greats, exemplified by the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White, was in the Greek tradition: silent and stoic, principled yet private.""

"Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny."

"“Race and crime can be discussed as long as the topic is framed in ‘root-causes’ terms: stick to the Three Ps—patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness.”"

"Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin."

"In a free society, the ‘vision thing’ is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a ‘visionary’ bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government... the poorer and less free the people."

"Healthy patriotism is associated with robust particularism – petty provincialism, if you like – and certainly not with the deracinated globalism exhibited by our GI Joes and Janes."

"The only kind of marriage liberals had ever glorified is the gay kind. But thanks to Michael Schiavo, the sanctity of marriage is fast becoming a liberal sacrament, with the proviso it has to involve 'mercy killing.' It took Michael Schiavo's devoted efforts to starve and dehydrate his wife to restore liberal faith in the institution."

"Liberals can always be trusted to see God in Mumia Abu-Jamal and the devil in the Pope."

"Adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to European governments has benefited Europeans as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man."

"Our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary precondition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one."

"The strength of ideas rests on their relationship to reality."

"The National Education Association is the al-Qaida of education."

"Islamic terrorism is the handiwork of people who’ve heeded, not hijacked, Islam."

"The free flow of people across borders is not to be confused with the free flow of goods across borders. Free trade is a positive-sum game. Contrary to illegal immigration, it is always invited, consensual and hence mutually beneficial to the parties involved."

"Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity."

"Gays have become colossal bores. Once interesting and iconoclastic, all they seem to crave nowadays is the State’s pension and seal of approval. They ought to go back to the days of the Stonewall Riots, when the police’s violations of privacy—and private property—were the object of their anger and activism."

"According to the disease theory of delinquency, the arsonist has 'pyromania,' the thief 'kleptomania,’ and Bill Clinton is not promiscuous, but a ‘sex-addict.’"

"On the unfalsifiable theory of global warming:"Evidence that contradicts the global warming theory, climate kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory; every permutation in weather patterns—warm or cold—is said to be a consequence of that warming or proof of it."

"Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, is now its dust bowl."

"Those of us who want the U.S. to stay solvent—and out of the affairs of others—recognize that sovereign nation-states that resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best hindrance to hegemonic overreach."

"Whatever open-border libertarians think about immigration law, once the immigration scofflaw steals, trespasses, or vandalizes private property, said alien is guilty of crimes. To say, moreover, that the state’s laws made masses of men and women commit such crimes is to voice the philosophy of determinism, not individualism."

"The problem with so many libertarian formulations is that they do not respect reality. Rather, they hold up the libertarian ideal, lament its unattainablility, and refuse to debate the issue until the ideal is achieved. That's intellectually lazy. It's also an affront to reality, the rational man's anchor."

"Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn."

"Rights give rise to legal claims. Ultimately, the more rights animals are granted, the greater the legal lien exercised on their behalf against the liberty and property of people."

"Like it or not, the modern marvel that was South Africa—with its space program and skyscrapers—was not the handiwork of the black nationalist movement now dismantling it; but the creation of those persecuted, pale, patriarchal Protestants."

"[Ron] Paul’s vision is as close to The Good Life as we could hope to come in the current ideological climate. Only tinny ideologues encased in worthless ideological armor – worthless because it exists in the arid arena of their minds, not on earth – would turn their noses up at the prospect of Paul."

"Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks. (NIMBYs excepted. Senator Edward Kennedy is a not-in-my-backyard environmentalist: he opposes wind farms in Nantucket Sound, offshore from his Hyannis Port compound.)"

"[G]lobal warming, that manufactured monomania."

"Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project."

"Breaking into a country signals quite reliably a willingness to break yet more of the invaded country’s laws."

"Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Only fools flout them. The much–maligned price system works not only to secure supply but to conserve."

"Barack the boy was raised by his white maternal grandparents; his Kenyan father abandoned him. The qualities Americans appeared to find universally appealing in the ambitious, affable Obama—his confidence and calm, and his commitment to community and kin, education and excellence—these came from Kansas, not Kenya."

"If for harming himself a man forfeits his freedom, then he was never free in the first place."

"If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men would have long-since priced themselves out of the market."

"Whether they are armed with bombs or bacteria, stopping weaponized individuals from harming others ─ intentionally or unintentionally ─ falls perfectly within the purview of the “night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory”."

"The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule."

"Keynes was to economics as Katrina was to New Orleans."

"Demonstrators for a government takeover of medicine have a right to discuss their demands, but no right to enact these demands. … 'Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action."

"Still – and for all Obama's heavy hinting to the contrary – Islam has no "human rights." The ideas of individual rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And while dialogue is dignified; dhimmitude is not, even if it achieves a desired, if temporary, effect."

"By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers don't pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting."

"Government commissions are where accountability goes to die."

"There is no such thing as absolute free speech; there are only absolute rights of private property. Speech is circumscribed by private property rights. You may deliver a disquisition in my virtual or actual living room only if I permit you to so do."

"From the fact that most Americans want others to fund or subsidize their healthcare, it does not follow that they have such a right. A need is not a right. A man's life, liberty and the products of his labor were not intended to be up for grabs by grubby, greedy majorities."

"Liberty is not an aggregate social project. Every individual has rights. And rights give rise to obligations between all men, including those who are in power. That men band in a collective called 'government' doesn't give them license to violate individual rights."

"The Democratic and Republican parties each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one set of colluding quislings to the other, and back."

"Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital — people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy."

"Quotas are a perfectly logical, if diabolical, extension of the regulation of private property courtesy of the Civil Rights Act, whereby in an attempt to shape American society in politically pleasing ways, people have been coerced into liking, hiring or renting against their will or better judgment."

"The voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. The free market—it has not been unfettered for a very long time—is really a spontaneously synchronized order comprising trillions upon trillions of voluntary acts that individuals perform in order to make a living. Introduce government force and coercion into this rhythm and you get life-threatening arrhythmia. Under increasing state control, this marketplace - this magic, organic agora - starts to splutter, and people suffer."

"Whether it is committed by a group operating within or without the law, terrorism is still terrorism."

"The end result of positively reinforcing bad behavior is that you get more of it. The culmination of a failure to punish predators is a debased, dissolute, slum-dog society in which, by legal decree, the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper."

"Progressive policies lead to a regressive society."

"Government jobs are not an addition to the country's payroll; they are an increase in the nation's payload."

"Think of mass immigration into America as a global 'right of return."

"The idea that the Founders were flawed, sinful men like you and me is current among a hefty majority of Americans, conservative too. It is wrong. Quite the reverse. The Founders are matchless today both morally and intellectually — their actions bespeak a willingness to forsake fortunes and risk lives for liberty, a concept and cause alien to contemporary Americans, who're, mostly, bereft of both the mental and moral gravitas necessary to grasp it."

"The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government, chief of which is its liberalism. Like the government, the military is freighted with pathological political correctness."

"In an effort to create reality on the ground - instead of reporting on it - the American media seem to color events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism."

"Libya is a war of the womb. A product of the romantic minds of women — Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice — who fantasize about an Arab awakening. It is estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids."

"The titan is tired. We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don't need our friends looking to us to do so."

"Like or dislike her, the British Queen is harmless. Her role is purely ceremonial. Conversely, life and death are in the hands of the monarch who sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

"The United States has already passed on as the world’s economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the 'fore horse for oppression and despotism,' after which 'taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

"The prototypical WASP is flabby in body and mind. He is fearful and easily cowed. He erupts in tears at a drop of a hat. He is gripped by the culture of apology, and flagellates over sins he has not committed. His eternal state of expiation is driven not by goodness, but by insufferable self-righteousness."

"Europeans have come to realize that adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to their own government has benefited them as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man."

"Socialism is humanity's second nature. All politicians do is turn human vice into votes."

"From dwarf tossing to drug taking: The legislator has no place in voluntary exchanges between consenting adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these might be."

"A depraved culture supports a depraved politics and vice versa."

"When South Africa was governed by a racist white minority, it was scorned by the West and treated as Saddam Hussein was, with boycotts and sanctions. Now that a racist, black-majority government controls the country; that it is as violent as Iraq, Liberia, or the Congo and rapidly becoming another Islamist-friendly, failed African state, it is the toast of the West."

"America, a humane society, ought to take pity on the persecuted descendants of another Protestant patriarchy. However, even if American immigration policy welcomed white South Africans, which it doesn't, Afrikaners would find it hard to leave. The Boers (and British) built the place. Like Heidi away from the Alps, Afrikaners tend to wilt when separated from their homeland. Not for nothing have the Afrikaners been dubbed "The White Tribe of Africa.""

"By staving off crime and communism, the apartheid regime, a vast repressive apparatus though it was, saved black South Africans from an even worse moral and material fate."

"Why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwived Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place? Such an investigation political correctness prohibits."

"Provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, generalizations are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decisions in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities. That one chooses not to live in a particular crime-riddled county or country in no way implies that one considers all individual residents there to be criminals, only that a sensible determination has been made, based on statistically significant data, as to where scarce and precious resources—one's life and property—are best invested."

"A bully's universe: US foreign policy operates upon the premise that American men and matériel should be capable of reaching and controlling all corners of the world."

"In Syria, we witnessed "a successful attempt by the Russians at replacing bully power with a balance of power.""

"If regular visits with prostitutes kept the political class from launching trillion-dollar war- and welfare programs, and financing Fanny, Freddy and the Fed—I would personally contribute to a prostitution fund for Washington whores. The prostitutes would be the patriots."

"In a democracy, thumping majorities prevail."

"Men in authority are now a threatened minority."

"‘You didn't build that’ will be Obama's political epitaph: With these remarks, Obama has come out of the closet as a most odious collectivist, who believes religiously that government predation is a condition for production. Or, put simply, that the parasite created the host."

"Chinese mercantilism is not free trade, but it is far better than American militarism."

"Hamas hides among unwitting civilians, who have no way of controlling its activities. This fact does not give Israel the right to kill innocent non-combatants, not even unintentionally. Besides, murder is not 'unintentional' when you know it is inevitable."

"A right that can't be defended is a right in name only. If you cannot by law defend your life, you have no right to life. If you cannot defend your property, you have no right of private property. And if you cannot defend your liberty, you are not a free man. It follows that inherent in the idea of an inalienable right is the right to mount a vigorous defense of the same rights."

"Most people would define treason as a betrayal of one's country or sovereign. In my book, the book of natural law, treason is properly defined as a betrayal of one's countrymen—and, in particular, the betrayal of the individual's right to life, liberty and property. (To your question, yes, this renders almost all politicians traitors by definition.)"

"The glue of American togetherness is gone, replaced by a flimsy, fluid, and thoroughly fake unity peddled by politicians. ‘Ideas’ they call it. On the one day, it's a crusade for democracy; on the next, it's a war against racism."

"A balanced-budget requirement implies is that government has the constitutional right to spend as much as it takes in; that government is permitted to waste however much revenue it can extract from wealth producers, and that the bums must merely bring into balance what was stolen (taxes) with what is squandered (spending)."

"The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, 'Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.' In our ignorance of the Immoral values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children."

"The only time Republicans will shake fists and point fingers is over a war delayed, one that isn't led by the US, or a war waged without the necessary conviction (read collateral damage)."

"It would appear that the Keynesian faithful have foisted on free-market capitalists an unfalsifiable theory. Evidence that contradicts it, Keynesian kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory."

"But public works, economic protectionism, cheap money, 'deficit-financed government spending,' and 'the animal spirits of the spendthrift' in the service of boosting 'consumption demand'... Doesn't Keynesianism simply appeal to the worst in human nature?"

"Distinguish we must between the right of the people the world over to be free and our obligation to free them. We have a solemn [negative] duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because the ostensible upholding of the negative rights of the world's citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—our lives, our liberties and our livelihoods. A just government’s duty is to its own citizens first."

"He who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war."

"The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports the same inherent malignancies and perverse incentives of government, down to the racial-spoils system."

"[T]rade, not democracy, is the best antidote to war."

"Our staggeringly pompous president is incapable of comprehending that a businessman cannot pay a worker in excess of his productivity and hope to stay solvent."

"There are just too many Americans grubbing for free stuff and a preponderance of Republicans eager to parcel it out in exchange for power."

"[M]embers of the media-monetary-military-congressional complex are immoral and have an allergy to the truth."

"In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off."

"The Big-Media collective is slow, stupid and shackled by ideology. Reality must bite them before they'll recognize it, much less report it."

"Prosperity and penury do not turn on gyno-centric and gay matters. But leftist statists and libertarians of the left place these wedge issues at the forefront of the fight for freedom. [...] Every bit as bad as liberals, "libertarian" political operators are prepared to shed political blood over any imagined sign of bigotry."

"What is more obscene: the idea that one can apologize for the hubris and deceit that is Obama and his health care, or the actual need some have for an apology from an entity so evil that he would toy with the lives of millions as though they were insects and he God? This is hard to tell."

"Certain bedrock principles — arguably a true conservative mindset — dictate a respect for life. A life-conserving sensibility means that guns are meant for self-defense, not for needless killing[…] This gun owner is no gun nut; but a right-to-self-defense fanatic."

"Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the quaint notion that certain eternally aggrieved identity groups have exclusive linguistic rights to words in the English language."

"A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia."

"To the American media, mining Mandela's legacy has meant repeating the man's fortune-cookie profundities and warmed-over wisdom."

"A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the Right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional – a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure."

"…free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented. Parity in prosperity and performance between differently able individuals and groups can be achieved only by playing socialist leveler."

"Christianity in our country is a lot like what the Ducksters profess. No longer doctrinaire or demanding, the mishmash of pop-religion practiced in churches across America is an extension of the therapeutic culture: festooned with feelings, mostly misdirected. Untempered by intelligent interpretation of scripture… American pop-theology: light on doctrine, heavy on hellfire and damnation."

"In the rare event that the Supreme Court refuses to play along—there is always a perfectly legal, extra-constitutional, quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, quasi-judicial, 'independent' regulatory commission or executive agency to kill off or override constitutional protections."

"The nice men in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment were recklessly naive to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve to check one another."

"Think of lab rats racing through a maze, when you watch the sub-intelligent, dual-panel 'dialogue' … Each rat runs with a designated, neatly bifurcated (Republican or Democratic) political orthodoxy. Each is a 'maze-bright' rat, and not the possessor and giver of any truth."

"As a Special-Forces commander, Sharon was on the front—and in front of his men — performing daring assaults that saved Israel in both the 1967 and 1973 wars. Hated though he was abroad, Sharon was, nevertheless, a soldier in the style of 'Stonewall' Jackson, not Dubya the Deserter, to whom he and the Likudniks were often compared."

"If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government—the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be."

"Most matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of the judiciary. So much for Alexander Hamilton's promise, in Federalist No. 78 (May 28, 1788), that the Judiciary would be the weakest of the three branches of his proposed government."

"… we’re not all the same. A common liberal refrain … is that differences between individuals are statistically more significant than those between cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. I don’t see why the fact of inter-individual differences would nullify inter-group variance. That’s liberal logic for you."

"Obamacare is a marketplace in the same way the Knockout Game is a game."

"Dance, in general, has become more atavistic than artistic."

"B. B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach."

"A silly society is a youth-obsessed society: To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of grey ‘hairs and no-hairs’ to ‘black hairs’—the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S."

"Ludwig von Mises referred to Ayn Rand as 'the most courageous man in America.' If that doesn't say it all about the economist's man-centric frame of reference, I don't know what does."

"The proposition that economist Ludwig von Mises was a feminist is an apodictic impossibility."

"Whether arrived at through reason or revelation… natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just."

"Round and round will Americans be compelled to ride on a mindless, manufactured, racial carousel … for without it, the edifice of an industry built upon grievance and excuse-making is destined to collapse."

"By going on the defensive... libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone and deserve to be purged from “polite” company."

"Conservatives question government programs. War is a government program. If they hope to retain a modicum of philosophical integrity, conservatives will have to include a critique of the state's warfare machine in their case against its welfare apparatus."

"Mrs. Clinton’s riches are not capitalism’s reward for hard work. Hillary has accrued wealth by using the predatory political process to wield power over others."

"Iraq hasn't suddenly 'slipped back into' this backward and benighted state. It was bombed there by a mulish military power which didn't know Shiite from Shinola. [translated from German]"

"You'll get your free IUDs and morning-after-pills, if not from your employer or the insurers — then from the increasingly desperate taxpayer (who, by now, might even consider paying for a spaying, too)."

"Ask yourself: "Do I police what people say for political propriety? … do I scrutinize great literature, music, art, television or comedy for signs of so-called sexism, racism, elitism, homophobia, antisemitism and meanness? Am I incapable of appreciating a superbly written script or book; a sublime painting or symphony; a smart stand-up routine, if only because the material and its creator violate the received laws of political correctness?"

"Ask any left-liberal American Jew if he supports a 'Right of Return' to Israel proper for every self-styled Palestinian refugee, and he'll likely recoil: 'Are you meshuga? Never! That's a euphemism for Israel's demise.' The very thing he rejects for Israel, the liberal Jew is inclined to champion for America: a global right of return to the US for citizens of the world."

"An American writer's intellectual energy ought to focus on American interests, first. Personal probity demands it! Otherwise, the columnist is a fifth column."

"The sight of the Yazidis driven up the arid, exposed mountain range, chased by the militant Sunni of the Islamic State (ISIS), conjures Masada, A.D. 73, where Jews chose to die on their own terms."

"This White House fetishizes Iraqi national unity. It believes that to succeed, Iraqis should be like Americans, forever imprisoned in an arranged, unhappy political marriage."

"By all means, argue against laws that prohibit victimless 'crimes' on the ground that these disproportionally ensnare blacks. But do not err in accusing all cops of targeting blacks, when the former are entrusted with enforcing the law, and the latter violate the law in disproportion to their numbers in the general population."

"Leave ISIS to Syria, Tehran and Tel Aviv. Let the locals take out their trash."

"Opposing the policies of the American state is not synonymous with opposing 'America.' It is possible to disavow every single action taken by the U.S. government and still love the 'little platoons' of America, as Edmund Burke described a man's social mainstay—his family, friends, coreligionists, coworkers. By logical extension, it is dishonest to malign those who assign the 'bad' category to the state, on the ground that they hate 'America.'"

"Good immigrants come to America to be part of the 'little platoons' that make up its glorious private economy: the people of Nike, Apple, Microsoft, Starbucks, McDonald's, Amazon, Google, Marriot, Mattel, FedEx, Costco, Coca-Cola, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Fred Meyer, Overstock.com, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and millions of local franchises run by innovative, everyday Americans. Bad immigrants come to America to partake of the state."

"Working for government ought to be one of the most dangerous jobs ever. Occupational hazard might just get us a better class of parasite."

"It's always good to see gender set-asides and affirmative action—in particular, the delusion that women are just as qualified as men to be soldiers, security guards, firefighters and cops—hurt those who inflict it on non-believers."

"If not by design at least by default; reflexively if not intentionally, government operatives work to retain their positions and increase their sphere of influence."

"“From financial aid (for foreign students) to an affirmative-action placement in Harvard Law School, Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of America’s creation.”"

"“Obama didn’t build what he has; he got it by grant of government privilege.”"

"The road to freedom lies in beating back the state, so that individuals may regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and generally, associate at will. As a paleolibertarian, however, my idea of liberty is never propositional–it is not a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values."

"The paleolibertarian grasps that liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure."

"Like left-liberals, "lite libertarians"—they're the kind that is afflicted with the same spineless conformity; a deformation of the personality euphemized as political correctness—are incapable of appreciating a script or book; a painting or symphony; a stand-up routine, if only because the material and its creator violates the received laws of political correctness."

"The night-watchman state of classical liberalism would keep murderers out of the country, not in."

"The media lie so much, that when stuff happens that scares them, they no longer know where to turn for the truth."

"Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised is how progressives prefer to depict the Muslim murderers in their midst. After all, progressives hail from the school of therapeutic “thought” that considers crime to have been caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized and outsourced to state-approved experts, or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society."

"Western foreign policy is a necessary but insufficient reason for Muslim aggression."

"At the annual White House Sycophants' Dinner, the most pretentious people in the country, in politics, journalism and entertainment - not the country's natural aristocracy, but its authentic Idiocracy - convene and revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us."

"Where, pray tell, are those 'made in Russia' labels? Other than crude and commodities; Kalashnikovs (AK-47s) and Vodka – what does post-communist Russia peddle?"

"Tyranny strives for uniformity."

"Demographics need not be destiny. The West became the best not by out-breeding the undeveloped world... but because of human capital; people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy."

"The Articles of Confederation, which were usurped in favor of the Constitution at the Philadelphia convention, are better founding documents than the Constitution."

"The individual living in America as it was meant to be would be free to run his business as he wishes, associate with those he likes, dissociate from those he dislikes or disapproves; hire, fire, rent to or evict from, invest and disinvest, speak and misspeak at will. This hypothetical free man is at liberty to bruise as many feelings as he likes, so long as his mitts stop at the next man's face. So long as he harms nobody's person or property, our mythic man may live as he wishes to live."

"Anti-discrimination law is inconsistent with freedom of association and the right of private property."

"Programmed from on high, Europeans, like Americans, are bound by the suicide pact of political correctness to open their borders to the huddled mass of Third World people, no matter the consequences to their societies."

"Republicanism is so meaningless a political identity that a Democrat can just as easily transition to being one, without too much pain."

"Another dynamic is at play in the region besides the Sunni-Shia divide. It is that between the forces of centralization and the forces of decentralization. As a rule, the U.S. sides with the former; the Arab people with whom we meddle generally side with the latter. Given the tribal, familial focus of their societies; Arabs are unlikely to abandon their particularism in favor of American statism."

"Yankees are fond of citing Confederacy officials in support of slavery and a war for slavery. Most Southerners, however, were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a 'War for Southern Independence.' They rejected central coercion. Southerners believed a union that was entered voluntarily could be exited in the same way."

"Propensities for crime are irrelevant in a discussion about the murder of an individual — Ms. Kathryn Steinle and all other victims of criminals who should not be in the U.S. For these deaths have nothing to do with aggregate crime rates; they're about individuals who should be alive: a baby that should have been born, a girl who should be among the living, young men and women who should not be dead. To justify the crime-probabilities line-of-inquiry in the context of killer Francisco Sanchez' presence that day on the San Francisco pier, you would need to show that had Sanchez been deported or jailed or turned back at the border—his victim, Ms. Steinle, would nevertheless have suffered the same fate at the hands of a native murderer. The same eventuality would need to be demonstrated with respect to each individual victim of a criminal alien. The implication is crushingly stupid."

"In America, black is beautiful. To be black is to be more righteous, nobler; carry the heaviest historic baggage — heavier than the Holocaust — and be encouraged to perpetually and publicly pick at those suppurating sores. To be black is to have an unwritten, implicit social contract with wider, whiter society. To be black it to be born with an IOY (I Own You); it is to be owed apologies, obsequiousness, education, and auto-exculpation for any wrongdoing."

"Like no other, drug legalization is a proxy black issue, worthy of the endorsement of the 'Black Lives Matter' movement."

"A professional politician is opportunistic and parasitic. For his survival, he must feed off his hosts. To convince the host to let him hook on and drain his lifeblood, the political hookworm must persuade enough of them to believe his deception. The energies of this political confidence trickster are thus focused on gaining voter confidence by promising what will never be delivered and what is impossible to deliver."

"Henpecked though he was by the Murdoch Media's golden goose — Megyn Kelly — Trump demonstrated that he is what his constituency craves: A man in the old mold."

"Fox News' Megyn Kelly has fast succumbed to the female instinct to show-off, bare skin, flirt and wink. She now also regularly motormouths it over the occasional smart guest she entertains (correction: the one smart guest, Ann Coulter). At the same time, Kelly has dignified the tinnitus named Dana Perino with a daily slot as Delphic-oracle."

"Guns are not the root cause of man's evil actions... Evil is part of the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can't be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. Evil is here to stay. Bad people do bad things. Deal, as they say in the hood."

"Canada is a high-wage area. The U.S. is a high-wage area. Latin America is a low-wage area. Migratory pressure flows from low-wage to high-wage regions; from the Third World to the First World (until migratory equilibrium is reached when First World becomes Third World)."

"According to liberal liturgy, if not for largely exogenous circumstances—all human beings would be capable of similar accomplishments. Many a co-opted scientist will second the political dictum that there is no such thing as general intelligence. Speak, if you must, about the phenotype—even genotype—of all individual traits other than intelligence. As for the possibility of group genotypic intelligence: Don't go there!"

"Neoconservatives are still in the business of creating their own parallel reality and forcing ordinary Americans, Europeans and Middle-Easterners to inhabit the ruins."

"If America busies itself not with elective wars, but with commerce, the shift in power and prestige will be away from politicians who prosecute wars, and back to The People who produce prosperity."

"Jews like presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders have forgotten that riches are a reward for work well done. In the Jewish faith's infinite wisdom, wealth justly acquired is a sign of God's blessing."

"Be it Hillary Clinton or burn-the-wealth Bernie Sanders — both agree that it is up to them, the all-knowing central planners, to determine how much of your life ought to be theirs to squander."

"Like gun laws, spy laws, courtesy of the Surveillance State, oppress only law-abiding, harmless individuals."

"Donald Trump's political rivals look at the price exacted by a Muslim like Syed Farouk and his bride in the aggregate. To a politician, 14 lives in 322 million is a small price to pay for 'our freedoms.' Fourteen dead in San Bernardino is not a steep price to pay for unfettered immigration from Islamic countries, peddled politically as 'our values,' 'our tolerance,' 'our greatness.' This callous calculus is second nature to neoconservative politicians like Lindsey Graham or Darth Vader Cheney. Not to Trump."

"Said Saint Augustine, 'The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.' The Republican Party under Bush did the devil's work. Bar the sainted Ron Paul, not a dog of a Republican lifted his leg in protest of the unjust war on Iraq. To embark on the good, the GOP must come clean about the bad."

"Donald Trump has buried George W. Bush, for good. Or so we hope. This might not be 'Morning in America,' but it is a moral victory for values in America. Somewhere in those Judeo-Christian values touted by 'values voters' is an injunction against mass murder."

"We do know. We can say for sure. And we have all the documents. George W. Bush lied America into war."

"In the classical conservative and libertarian traditions values are private things. They must be left to individuals and to civil society to practice and police. Party and state operatives have police powers with which to back their 'values.' Therefore, never-ever are they to preach or police The People's values."

"The no-longer-silent majority is exhausted, sick-and-tired of being racially ramrodded. They've had enough of the pigment burden."

"I don't know that Trump favors protective tariffs, import quotas or export subsidies. I do know that we don't have free trade. What goes for 'free trade' is trade managed by powerful bureaucracies—national and transnational international—central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health, and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds do as they please. My understanding is that Trump simply wants to make these agreements and organs work for the American people."

"Voluntary exchanges are by definition advantageous to their participants. Within this voluntary, mutually beneficial relationship, I give up an item I value less, for something I value more: a fee for the desired product or service. My trading partners, whose valuations are in complementary opposition to mine, reciprocate in kind. Ceteris paribus (all other things being equal), there's nothing wrong with my running a trade deficit with Costco, my hair stylist or my GTI dealer, as I do—just as long as I pay for my purchases. However, the data demonstrate that Americans, in general, are not paying for their purchases."

"“Democrat Grover Cleveland was America’s last conservative president. He preached and practiced the maxim that ‘the people must support the government, but the government must not support the people.'”"

"While the Left controls the intellectual means of production—schools (primary, secondary, tertiary), media, foundations, think tanks, publishing prints—the 'Respectable Right' is hardly on the outs with the liberal smart set."

"Republican presidents who've talked and acted conservatively are as elusive as Big Foot. There hasn't been a sighting in maybe a century. A purist would cite Democrat Grover Cleveland as America's last conservative president. He preached and practiced the maxim that 'the people must support the government, but the government must not support the people."

"When it comes to philosophical convictions, most conservatives more closely resemble their beltway liberal friends than Republican Party voters. From the country's dismal finances and propagandized population, a sizable segment has concluded that conservative power-brokers and liberal power-brokers are indistinguishable."

"One defining issue over which New Conservatives and liberals practically converge: Islam is peaceful, except for a few bad Abduls."

"Centuries of Islam, transmitted through mother's milk, cannot be tweaked out of the Muslim DNA like some unsightly nose-hair."

"Survival—of the species of the culture of the faith—has a biological dimension. What would have befallen our Hominid ancestors had they implemented gender parity in their hunter-gatherer societies—sometimes the women hunt while the men forage and mind the kids, and vice versa?"

"At its core, the argument against racism, at least as it works to further black interests, is an argument against collectivism. You're meant to avoid judging an entire people based on the color of their epidermis or the conduct of a statistically significant number of them. It is, however,deemed perfectly acceptable to malign and milk Europeans for all they're worth, based on the lack of pigment in their skin and their overall better socio-economic performance."

"The following quotes are taken from Mercer's column "The Third Degree à la Germany," Townhall.com, Nov 29, 2016, in which she answers the Junge Freiheit questionnaire."

"I‘m strictly reality oriented. I don’t indulge in make-believe. I don’t wish to be where I’m not."

"I’d give "anything" for freedom from The State, provided "anything" is a figure of speech (no limbs, eyes, etc.)"

"(When asked - "What do you consider important in life?") "Meaningful work, intellectual honesty (rare), close relationships, good health, my guns, my companion parrot (Oscar-Wood), related advocacy and charities.""

"The concept of a Favorite Book is childish, if you’re a lifelong reader. Lots of books of political theory, philosophy and economics have indelibly influenced my thinking."

"In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," instead of "life, liberty and property." With that vagueness, Jefferson undermined the foundation of civilization: private property right."

"Traditionalists value hierarchy. An infantile, immoral society deifies The Child. Kids should follow Florence King's injunction that "children have no business expressing opinions on anything except, 'Do you have enough room in the toes?'"

"“Liberals have developed a utopian vision of how nature should behave. It must remain in perfect balance. To that end, they’ll exterminate harmless critters that violate the liberal idea of Order; of species correctness. While animals may not migrate illegally, or disrupt the preordained ‘natural’ order—liberal social engineers encourage non-indigenous peoples to mess with the social habitat of historic, host populations. Provided they’re white.”"

"“The Left's delayed Russophobia is about a century too late.”—ILANA MERCER,"

"Mythical thinking thrives in a culture that eschews objective truth: ours."

"Where once there was an understanding that a reality independent of the human observer exists; students are now taught that truth is a social construction, a function of the power and position—or lack thereof—of persons or groups in society."

"“Obama is a case study in hubris.”"

"“The countdown to President-elect Trump's inauguration has morphed into a search-and-rescue for the Barack Obama legacy, except that when something is dead; it becomes a recovery operation.”"

""Audacity we won't miss: Obama praised his spoilt daughters for graciously wearing 'the burden of years' of life in the lap of luxury (courtesy the taxpayer), a sentiment his wife, Michelle Antoinette Obama, seconded.”"

"An historical, national Jewish right to the city of Jerusalem does not extinguish the property rights of individual Arab homesteaders acquired over the years. Muslims residing in East Jerusalem must just learn to extend to their Jewish neighbors the courtesy their Muslim brethren receive from their Jewish neighbors, in Israel proper. In other words, allow Jews to live in peace. Or, just to live."

"Quick quiz: What does 'unoccupied' or 'liberated' Palestinian land look like? Answer: Like Gaza."

"Self-government, and not imposed government, implies that society, and not The State, is to develop value systems. The State's role is to protect citizens as they go about their business peacefully, living in accordance with their peaceful values."

"Because our form of government is incompatible with the enforcement of values, the American People can't and mustn't welcome into their midst civilizations whose values are inimical to the survival of their own."

"In adding Iran to the travel ban, President Trump is clearly appeasing the neoconservative snakes slithering around his administration. They’re fixing for a fight with Iran, stupidly collapsing the distinction between the Iranian State (sponsor of terrorism), and the Iranian people (who’re not the reason the Eiffel Tower is being walled-off by bullet-proof glass)."

"It’s not right-wing populism that endangers Jewish survival in Europe and Canada; it’s the influx of Muslims. There’s nothing new in the Jewish leadership’s habit of kibitzing about the dangers to Jewish continuity from marauding Mormons (their sin is to convert dead Jews). Or, from Mel Gibson, whose movie “The Passion of the Christ” was supposed to unleash pogroms in Pittsburgh, as they falsely prophesied."

"I hope I speak for Deplorables when I say this: The only time you want the president to reach across the aisle on matters immigration is to grab a Democrat or an errant Republican by the throat."

"By upholding the moral order, President Trump is also restoring the natural order inverted by his predecessors. The feminist order of Obama had humiliated thousands of American men-of-action by turning them into wet-nurses."

"On ICE agents minding illegal alien minors: "By upholding the moral order, President Trump is also restoring the natural order, inverted by his predecessors. The feminist order of Obama had humiliated thousands of American men-of-action by turning them into wet-nurses.""

"Look forward to epic images of heavy equipment barreling toward the Southern border. The sight of a gold-plated structure going up, as sections of the borderland along Mexico start to resemble Liberace's backyard: This is sure to warm the cockles of your heart, and make America's monomaniacal media go berserk."

"If a veteran political operative like Barack Obama is considered beyond reproach, incapable of abusing power—all the more so is it irrational, irresponsible and in Third-World style to hound an administration not yet fully assembled or ensconced, for a political past it lacks. Sane people must walk away from Fake News' Russia Ruse."

"We dare not suggest that a civilization created by a particular people with a particular religious and racial profile, may well perish once those people are replaced or have engineered their own replacement."

"The idea of the American 'creedal nation,' which is supposed to unite us all in 'a common commitment to a set of ideas and ideals,' is abstract and inorganic. This creed comes from above, not from below. It's a state religion reflexively developed to bring about compliance."

"In Cool Britannia, the moniker the Island acquired in the times of trendy Tony Blair, the only way disarmed Britons may shoot a savage is with ... a camera."

"The category of 'criminal' (according to incontrovertibly correct libertarian political theory) entails the outlaw criminal class—it needs no introduction—and the legalized criminal class: the politicians."

"Life with Islam is life under Islam and its enablers."

"Look at Jared Kushner. The poor man looks low T—like he might one day go the way of Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner. (I love LGBTQ, so long as they come in peace.) Jared's not wearing the pants in the Kushner castle. The beguilingly beautiful Ivanka is."

"Actors are a troupe that makes a living pretending to be something they're not. Professional poseurs, if you like. Granted, they're not parasites, like the politicians with whom they cavort. But Tinseltown is a left-liberal ideological collective. They march in thematic unison. That their cultural products have become artistically worthless could well be because activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories and good scripts. Hollywood is a pretty, pea-brained community."

"Those gathered at the Annual Correspondents' Dinner, or their Christmas party, are not the country's natural aristocracy, but its authentic Idiocracy. No matter how poor their predictive powers, no matter how many times they get it wrong—in war and in peace—the presstitutes always find time for this orgy of self-praise."

"Like nothing else, the annual Correspondents' Dinner is a mark of a corrupt politics. It's a sickening specter, where some of the most pretentious, worthless people in the country—in politics, journalism and entertainment—convene to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the rest of us in Rome's provinces."

"The White House Correspondents' Dinner (WHCD) should have been more appropriately called the Sycophants' Supper. Would that it was the last such supper."

"Satire in the US has been killed off by the twin tyrannies of political correctness and affirmative action."

""The more abstract the expert Idiocracy gets in defining what is murder-by-Muslim immigrant, the more removed will be their solutions—removed from solutions that are at once achievable and the legitimate purview of limited government.”"

"ISIS and an abstract ideology called 'radical Islamic terrorism'—a redundancy, if ever there was one, since Islam unreformed is radical—are not attacking us. Men and women upon whom we've conferred the right to live among us are."

""Nations whose institutions promote cultural relativism and hate of the dominant culture have no business importing the sort of immigrant who'll be quick to act on an ideology of hate—be it the self-hate of the host, or the hate in Jihad.”"

"In the US, Great Britain and Western Europe, state and civil society acculturate immigrants into a militant identity politics. Essentially, newcomers are taught to hate their hosts."

""Wars are generally a rich man's affair and a poor man's fight.”"

"There was no man more valorous and courageous than Robert E. Lee."

""'Deep State' is no conspiracy theory. There's nothing mythical about the Republican and Democratic career government workers, embedded like parasites in the bowels of the bureaucracy, the intelligence community, the military, and a like-minded media, who've risen on their hind legs to protect their turf and protest an agenda that leaves them out in the cold.”"

"The anatomy and workings of the Deep State are reflexive, rather than a matter of collusion and conspiracy. Simple psychology—human nature at its worst—sees government jobs and programs, war and welfare alike, protected in perpetuity and at all costs by the administrators of government jobs and programs."

""Hidden or in plain sight, The State is geared toward increasing or maintaining its sphere of influence, never reducing it. Voters are paid lip service, provided their wishes coincide with the aims of this unelected, entrenched apparatus. But when the popular will defies Deep State, that monster breathes fire.”"

"The tools threatening President Trump with impeachment have one bag of tricks stuffed with power tools: they audit, indict, arrest, bomb, change regimes. They don't make profitable business deals; they tax them. They don't make peace; they wage war."

"The president's linguistic infelicities—a word salad, at times—have given the press popinjays and their Washington overlords the foothold needed to go after the president. Throw in the 'bad' habits of a businessman he has retained. Trump transacts with everyone—Russians too. We voted for deals, not wars. This is the sum and substance of President Trump's offenses. That, and beating Hillary Clinton to the White House."

"“President Trump is too set in his ways and independent-minded to imbibe the layers of debased semiotics with which government lawyers routinely rape reality.""

"The manufacturing of Fake News by the Deep State, circa 2017, is of a piece with the anatomy of the ramp-up to war in Iraq, in 2003. Except that back then, Republicans, joined by diabolical Democrats like Hillary Clinton, were the ones dreaming up Homer Simpson's Third Dimension."

"To comprehend the hysterical mass contagion that is the war on Trump it's essential to trace the contours of that other war, 'Operation Iraqi Freedom,' and the way it was peddled to the American public."

"When you're the most powerful entity in the world, as the US government certainly is—the only government to have dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations ('good' bombs, because dropped by the US)—you get to manufacture your own parallel universe with its unique rules of evidence and standards of proof. What's more, as the mightiest rule-maker, you can coerce other earthlings into 'sharing' your alternate reality. Or else."

"Contemporary Americans are less likely to read the Declaration of Independence now that it's easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution."

"Our bickering wards in the Middle-East aren't about to forget their religious jealousies and join forces, certainly not under American guardianship. The conflicts are regional, tribal, ancient. They're impervious to outside, top-down intervention."

"America's foreign police is Disneyfied production, starring, invariably, an evil dictator who was killing his noble people, until, high on paternalism, America rode to the rescue."

"Arisen online and beyond is a niche-market of nudniks (nags): Women talking, blogging, vlogging, writing and publishing about women in high-technology or their absence therefrom; women beating the tom-tom about discrimination and stereotyping, but saying absolutely nothing about the technology they presumably love and help create."

"Statistics are silly unless given context. If you have one foot in fire, the other in ice, can we legitimately say that, on average, you're warm? Hardly. Probabilities, in this case the chance that any one of us will die-by-Muslim, are statistically insignificant—unless this happens to you or to yours, to me or mine."

"Barcelona and Beyond: How Politicians & Policy Wonks Play God With Your Life," American Thinker, August 20, 2017."A natural-rights libertarian values the life of the innocent individual. Only by protecting each individual's rights—life, liberty and property—can the government legitimately enhance the wealth of the collective. Only through fulfilling its night watchman role can government legitimately safeguard the wealth of the nation. For each individual, secure in his person and property, is then free to pursue economic prosperity, which redounds to the rest."

"Metaphorically speaking, free African-American politicians and activists are boiling the bones of their enslaved ancestors to make soup. The suffering of slaves is being exploited posthumously to shape discourse in politically advantageous ways."

"'Taking the knee' is like taking a pee. It's a waste. It speaks to the inward-looking, ego-driven, vain posturing of the Left and its perpetually seething, predatory racial coalition. They're bent on extracting something from innocent, ordinary Americans who owe them nothing."

"From the fact that a man or a community of men lacks the intellectual wherewithal or cultural and philosophical framework to conceive of property rights—it doesn't follow that he has no such rights, or that he has forfeited them. Not if one adheres to the ancient doctrine of natural rights."

""Liberalism and libertinism are intertwined. The more liberal a woman, the more libertine she'll be—and the more she'll liberate herself to be coarse, immodest, vulgar and plain repulsive."

"If men flashed for freedom as women do; they'd be arrested, jailed and placed on the National Sex Offender Registry."

"The power of the average pop artist and her products lies in the pornography that is her 'art,' in her hackneyed political posturing, and in the fantastic technology that is Auto-Tune (without which all the sound you'd hear these 'singers' emit would be a bedroom whisper)."

""No war makes Johnny McCain a sad boy.”"

""Our soldiers have been propagandized to conflate fighting for American freedom with fights in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali."

"The fact that there are moderate Muslims doesn't mean there is a moderate Islam."

"Violent Jihad is not an ideology, as our Moderate Muslim friends keep calling it. Jihad is a pillar of a faith. That faith is Islam."

"All Muslims can thrive in America. But not all Americans will thrive in the presence of Muslims. This is because the faith of Muslims is Islam. And Islam—the real or the imposter variety; it matters not—predisposes to violence. Some Americans will be hurt or die as a result of importing members of this militant faith."

"“It is in Man’s nature to dislike those who are unlike him - all the more so when they, as a group, have accomplished what he has not.”"

"“The price of labor in the high-tech labor market is a function of a political, artificially created, ceaseless supply of immigrants. Prattle about the price at which American workers will do certain work is meaningless without a reference to borders and to the thing they bound—communities. Render asunder the quaint idea of borders—and the world is your labor market; communities be damned. Realize that this ceaseless supply of labor is maintained not through peaceful market forces, but through the use of political power, wielded by wealthy men and women with access. At work here is their Brave New Borderless World, not the invisible hand we love.”"

"The H-1B visa racket is, however, a taxpayer-subsidized, grant of government privilege. Duly, profits remain private property. The costs of accommodating an annual human influx are socialized, borne by the bewildered community."

"Why have the leaders of the most powerful country on the African continent (Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma) succored the leader of the most corrupt (Mugabe)? These South African strongmen were, in a manner, saluting the Alpha Male Mugabe by implementing a slow-motion version of his program. When he socked it to the whites, Mugabe cemented his status as hero to black activists and their sycophants across South Africa."

"The object of creating bogus categories of crime is to leverage power over adversaries; to scare them."

"Ultimately, the State has overwhelming power when compared to the limited resources and power of an accused."

"An easy way for the government to create criminality where there is none is to make it a crime to lie to its agents, in this case the FBI, which is Deep State Central."

"Undergirding what Christians call the Old Testament is a message of particularism, not universalism."

"Corruption invariably flows from state to society."

"How exactly did the president normalize neoconservatism? In 2016, liberals accused candidate Trump of isolationism. Neoconservatives—aka Conservatism Inc.—did the same. Having consistently complained of his isolationism, the Left and the phony Right cannot but sanction President Trump's interventionism. To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand."

"On "shithole countries": "What makes a country, the place or the people? Does the country create the man or does the man make the country? The answer is no chicken-or-egg quandary. Human action is the ultimate adjudicator of a human being's worth. The aggregate action of many human beings acting in concert is what makes or breaks a society. In other words, it is the individual who creates the collective, not the other way around. The Man makes the country what it is.""

"Football fetish: "We all inhabit this busy mart called America, but are united by nothing meaningful at all. The football fetish in America has intensified in the context of a country whose inhabitants agree on little else than the importance of The Game. Consequently, come playoff time, we come together fleetingly and superficially, to make a religion out of our respective professional football teams.""

"Cannabis: The reason it's not in the Constitution is because letting states and individuals decide is in the Constitution. That thing of beauty is called the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

"Complaints about the damage done to our "democracy" by outsiders are worse than silly. Such damage pales compared to what we Americans have done to a compact rooted in the consent of the governed and the drastically limited and delimited powers of those who govern."

"Ours was never a country conceived as a democracy. To arrive at a democracy, we Americans destroyed a republic."

"“How did the mythical land of Saint Nelson Mandela turn into Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’? How did that country’s ‘vaunted’ constitution yield to ‘the horror, the horror’ of land theft? Easily, even seamlessly …”"

"“South Africa’s Constitution is descriptive, not prescriptive—full of pitch-perfect verbal obesities that provide little by way of recourse for those whose natural, individual rights are violated. As a protector of individual rights to life, liberty and property, it’s worse than useless—a wordy and worthless document.”"

"What comes out of the Trump White House is an ideological cacophony. Hiring different perspectives in business could well be a strength. But it's a weakness when politics and policy are in play. Needed to advance a political agenda is a team that shares the political philosophy underlying the agenda."

"“The American Idiocracy is moving to equate merit-based institutions with institutionalized racism.”"

"Effects of affirmative action: "No longer beholden to the unifying, overarching value of merit, institutions become riven by tribal feuds and factional loyalties—both in government and in business alike, where it is well-known that newly arrived 'minorities' hire nepotistically.""

"The only potential immigrants who still have that frontier spirit are South-African farmers. But American and European elites are uninterested in refugees who are ACTUALLY and actively being killed-off. That would be too much like preserving 'white privilege.'"

""Liberals have developed a utopian vision of how nature should behave. It must remain in perfect balance. To that end, they'll exterminate harmless critters that violate the liberal idea of Order; of species correctness. For example, when a delightful flock of gentle conure parrots made San Francisco's Telegraph Hill its home, radical environmentalists demanded the flock be exterminated because it wasn't indigenous. While animals may not migrate illegally, or disrupt the preordained 'natural' order—liberal central planners encourage non-indigenous peoples to mess with the social habitat of historic, host populations. Provided they're Caucasian.”"

""The liberal program aims to dissolve 'the constitution of man' in the service of sexual sameness. It is predicated on the imbecilic belief that biology is incidental, and that men and women are essentially interchangeable.”"

"The pale, liberal patriarchy is a pioneer in forever scrutinizing itself for signs of racism and deficits in empathy toward 'The Other,' while readily accusing others of the same. It's as though liberal men derive erotic pleasure from prostrating themselves to assailants and ceding to racial claims-making."

"If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government—the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be. Put differently, matters previously subject to state jurisdiction have been pulled into the orbit of the judiciary."

"In the postmodern tradition, the pseudo-academics behind the concept of white privilege have invented for themselves an artificial, political construct. Political constructs confer power on those who dream them up. For politics is the predatory process through which the figment of sick minds is weaponized."

"As the left sees it, if America isn't going to police the world; it must at least provide shelter to all people from unpoliced parts of the world."

"To the commentariat of CNN, MSNBC and BBC, wanting a place you can call home while white is … racist."

"It should be news to no one that American refugee policies favor the Bantu peoples of Africa over its Boers."

"Once illiberal, unassimilable people gain 'numeric superiority,' they will turn their population advantage into political advantage, using the host population's liberalism against it."

"The sounds emanating from the uterine core of the Democratic Party are the subhuman grunts and growls one hears from animals in estrus or mid-feed. Something is terribly wrong with them.""

"Democrats demonstrate daily that they’re not for the rule of law, but for the law of rule, mob rule."

"The Democratic Party has come to be controlled by hysterical women and their domesticated man servants. In conduct, these Democratic women are more feral than female."

"“A Democratic takeover promises to be a bitch for ordinary men.”"

"The anti-Trump protest ongoing is not cerebral or visceral, it’s gynocentric. And it’s expressly anti-male."

"Unite we Americans do over the state of our sovereign debt—it's bad! But not over what it means to be a sovereign people."

"It's only education that turns a man away from his tribe."

"I don’t care about people. I don’t care about anything, not even the white man. I want to feel what it is like to live in a free country and then maybe some of the evils in my life will correct themselves."

"He sat quite still, staring ahead with calm, empty eyes, and he looked so lordly for all his tattered coat and rough cowhide shoes that Makhaya smiled and walked up to him and greeted him."

"The country presented overwhelming challenges, he said, not only because the rainfall was poor but because the majority of the people engaged in subsistence farming were using primitive techniques that ruined the land. All this had excited his interest."

"But witch doctors were human, and nothing, however odd and perverse, need be feared if it was human."

"Why should men be brought up with a false sense of superiority over women? People can respect me if they wish, but only if I earn it."

"It was the mentality of the old hag that ruined a whole continent - some sort of clinging, ancestral, tribal belief that a man was nothing more than a grovelling sex organ, that there was no such thing as privacy of soul and body, and that no ordinary man would hesitate to jump on a mere child."

"Well-educated men often come to the crossroad of life .. One road might lead to fame and importance, and another might lead to peace of mind. It's the road of peace of mind that I'm seeking. ["

"In this country there is a great tolerance of evil. It is because of death that we tolerate evil. All meet death in the end, and because of death we make allowance for evil though we do not like it."

"It was his belief that a witty answer turneth away wrath and that the oil of reason should always be poured on troubled waters."

"Tie a man's hands behind his back and then ask him if he's going to chop down a tree."

"One might go so far as to say that it is strong, dominating personalities who might play a decisive role when things are changing. Somehow they always manage to speak with the voice of authority, and their innate strength of character drives them to take the lead in almost any situation. Allied to all this is their boundless optimism and faith in their fellow men."

"You find yourself throwing blows but weeping at the same time, because of all the people who sit and wail in the darkness, and because of all the fat smug persecutors to whom this wailing is like sweet music, and some inner voice keeps on telling you that your way is right for you, that the process of rising up from the darkness is an intensely personal and private one, and that if you can find a society that leaves the individual to develop freely you ought to choose that society as your home."

"Most men want to achieve great victories ... But I am only looking for a woman."

"There seemed to be ancient, ancestral lines drawn around the African man which defined his loyalties, responsibilities, and even the duration of his smile."

"Things wouldn’t have been so bad if black men as a whole had not accepted their oppression and added to it with their own taboos and traditions."

"Prostitutes, he was to decide, were the best type of women you'd find among all black women, unless a man wanted to be trapped for life by a dead thing. A prostitute laughed. She established her own kind of equality with men. She picked up a wide, vicarious experience that made her charter in a lively way, and she was so used to the sex organs of men that she was inclined to regard him as a bit more than a sex organ. Not so the dead thing most men married. Someone told that dead thing that a man was only his sex organs and functioned as such. Someone told her that she was inferior in every way to a man, and she had been inferior for so long that even if a door opened somewhere, she could not wear this freedom gracefully. There was no balance between herself and a man. There was nothing but this quiet, contemptuous, know-all silence between herself, the man and his functioning organs. And everyone called this married life, even the filthy unwashed children, the filthy unwashed floors, and piles of unwashed dishes."

"I don't know these people but my search for a faith has taught me that life is a fire in which each burns until it is time to close the shop."

"People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. ... It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion a like that."

"He had grown up in an atmosphere where the most important thing in the world was the stronger whose shadow darkened the doorstep. People were the central part of the universe of Africa, and the world stood still because of this."

"Poor people are poor because they don't know how to get rich."

"Dinorego was saying, ‘We can progress too, even though we are uneducated men. The mind of an uneducated man works like this: he is a listener and a believer. Most of all he is a believer.’"

"There was always something on this earth man was forced to love and worship by reason of its absence. People in cloudy, misty climates worshiped the sun, and people in semi-desert countries worshipped the rain."

"Most men were waiting for the politicians to sort out their private agonies."

"Being an African man he ought to have known that nothing happened on the continent of Africa without all Africans getting to know of it."

"Even the trees were dying, from roots upwards,' he said. 'Does everything die like this?' 'No,' she said. 'You may see no rivers on the ground but we keep the rivers inside us. That is why all good things and all good people are called rain. Sometimes we see the rain clouds gather even though not a cloud appears in the sky. It is all in our heart.'"

"No words, however wise, could explain the awfulness of the death, not while the living were firmly attached to love, child-bearing, child-rearing, hunger, struggle, and the sunrise of tomorrow. Life had to flow all the time, for the living, like water in a stream."

"If you said no, no, no, and kept your claws in a people's heart, what else did you want but that they should all die?"

"Was he crying now because, for the first time in his life, he was feeling what it must be like to face a tomorrow without any future?"

"Sometimes a man's God was like Solomon and he decked himself up in gold and he built a house that was a hundred cubits in length and fifty cubits in breadth and thirty cubits in height. Gold candlesticks, cherubims, and pomegranates adorned his house, which had forty bathrooms. And there are bowls and snuffers and spoons and censers and door hinges of pure gold. And all that the followers of Solomon could do was to gape and marvel and chronicle these wonders in minute detail. Even Solomon's wisdom took secondary place to his material possessions and dazzling raiment. Then came a God who was greater than Solomon, but he walked around with no shoes, in rough cloth, wandering up and down the dusty footpath in the hot sun, with no bed on which to rest his head. And all that the followers of this God could do was to chronicle, in minute detail, the wonder and marvel of his wisdom."

"Therefore the Good God cast one last look at Makhaya, whom he intended revenging almightily for his silent threat to knock him down. He would so much entangle this stupid young man with marriage and babies and children that he would always have to think, not twice but several hundred times, before he came to knocking anyone down."

"Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook it was there."

"You just have to look different ... then seemingly anything can be said and done to you as your outer appearance reduces you to the status of a non-human being."

"The rhythm of sunrise, the rhythm of sunset, filled her life."

"...a door silently opened on the small, dark airless room in which their souls had been shut for a long time. The wind of freedom, which was blowing throughout the world for all people, turned and flowed into the room."

"He was a thin little fellow with a hollowed-out chest and comic knobbly knees."

"Perhaps they want me to send a message to the children,’ he thought tenderly, noting that the clouds were drifting in the direction of his home some hundred miles away. But before he could frame the message, the warder in charge of his work span shouted:‘Hey, what you tink you’re doing, Brille?’"

"The prisoner swung round, blinking rapidly, yet at the same time sizing up the enemy. He was a new warder, named Jacobus Stephanus Hannetjie. His eyes were the color of the sky but they were frightening. A simple, primitive, brutal soul gazed out of them."

"They were grouped together for convenience, as it was one of the prison regulations that no black warder should be in charge of a political prisoner lest this prisoner convert him to his views. It never seemed to occur to the authorities that this very reasoning was the strength of Span One and a clue to the strange terror they aroused in the warders."

"Be good comrades, my children. Cooperate, then life will run smoothly."

"Hannetjie is just a child and stupidly truthful."

"The man really [is] a child."

"Scarcely a breath of wind disturbed the stillness of the day, and the long rows of cabbages were bright green in the sunlight. Large white clouds drifted slowly across the deep blue sky. Now and then they obscured the sun and caused a chill on the backs of the prisoners who had to work all day long in the cabbage field.This trick the clouds were playing with the sun eventually caused one of the prisoners who wore glasses to stop work, straighten up and peer shortsightedly at them. He was a thin little fellow with a hollowed-out chest and comic knobbly knees. He also had a lot of fanciful ideas because he smiled at the clouds."

"Up until the arrival of Warder Hannetjie, no warder had dared beat any member of Span One and no warder had lasted more than a week with them. The battle was entirely psychological. Span One was assertive and it was beyond the scope of white warders to handle assertive black men. Thus, Span One had got out of control. They were the best thieves and liars in the camp. They chatted and smoked tobacco. And since they moved, thought and acted as one, they had perfected every technique of group concealment."

"he said, “I don’t take orders from a kaffir. I don’t know what kind of kaffir you tink you are. Why don’t you say Baas. I’m your Baas. Why don’t you say Baas, hey?” Brille blinked his eyes rapidly but by contrast his voice was strangely calm.“I’m twenty years older than you,” he said. It was the first thing that came to mind, but the comrades seemed to think it a huge joke. A titter swept up the line. The next thing Warder Hannetjie whipped out a knobkerrie and gave Brille several blows about the head."

"You know, comrades,” he said, “I’ve got Hannetjie. I’ll betray him tomorrow.”"

"It was in Botswana where, mentally, the normal and the abnormal blended completely in Elizabeth’s mind.”"

"Be the same as others in heart; just be a person.”"

"It is when you cry, in the blackest hour of despair, that you stumble on a source of goodness.”"

"When someone says 'my people' with a specific stress on the blackness of those people, they are after kingdoms and permanently child-like slaves. 'The people' are never going to rise above the status of 'the people'. They are going to be told what is good for them by the 'mother' and the 'father'."

"'Life is such a gentle, treasured thing. I learn about it every minute. I think about it so deeply.'"

"When people stumble upon magic they study it very closely, because all living people are, at heart, amateur scientists and inventors. Why must racialists make an exemption of the black man? Why must she come here and help the black man with a special approach: ha, ha, ha, you're never going to come up to our level of civilisation?"

"The victim is really the most flexible, the most free person on earth. He doesn't have to think up endless laws and endless falsehoods. His jailer does that. His jailer creates the chains and the oppression. He is merely presented with it. He is presented with a thousand and one hells to live through, and he usually lives through them all."

"Who is the greater man - the man who cries, broken by anguish, or his scoffing, mocking, jeering oppressor?"

"'God isn't a magical formula for me,' ... 'God isn't a switched-on, mysterious, unknown current. I can turn to and, by doing so, feel secure in my own nobility."

"Love is so powerful, it's like unseen flowers under your feet as you walk."

"The year ended in a roar of pain."

"You don't realize the point at which you become evil."

"The loud, pounding rhythm of his drama drummed in her ears day and night."

"I did a lot of reading on my own because I loved that particular world. You open up a book and you learn about something that's much more exciting than your everyday grind, a world of magic beyond your own. And I feel that the beginnings of writing really start whereby you know that when you open a book there's a magical world there."

"I think that my whole life has been shaped by my South African experience and I would never really fall into the category of a writer who produces light entertainment for people. My whole force and direction comes from having something to say. What we are mainly very bothered about has been the dehumanizing of black people. And if we can resolve these situations-and I work both within the present and the future-if we can resolve our difficulties it is because we want a future which is defined for our children. So then you can't sort of say that you have ended any specific thing or that you have changed the world. You have merely offered your view of a grander world, of a world that's much grander than the one we've had already."

"when there is a tragedy, detail and a picture of the country emerges because people discuss it so much."

"You could really say that my writing experience began in Botswana. Everything about the society was magical to me and the reason I began writing is that I wanted to communicate that fascination I felt for the ways of life of the people of this country. It is almost impossible for a writer to evoke a similar feeling of magic and wonder about South Africa. It's too despairing."

"In my novel, A Question of Power, I was extremely bothered to define evil. I was looking for answers all along to questions of exploitation. And I was looking for balances; that is, if we have to live with good and evil we ought to present them as they really are."

"I was born on the sixty of July, 1937, in the Pietermaritzburg Mental Hospital, in South Africa. The reason for my peculiar birthplaces was that my mother was white, and she had acquired me from a black man. She was judged insane, and committed to the mental hospital while pregnant. Her name was Bessie Emery and I consider it the only honor South African officials ever did me—naming me after this unknown, lovely, and unpredictable woman.""

"I have always been just me, with no frame of reference to anything beyond myself.""

"Whatever my manifold disorders are, I hope to get them sorted out pretty soon, because I've just got to tell a story.""

"In a cold and loveless country like South Africa his warmth of heart and genuine friendliness is like a great roaring fire on the white icy wastes of the Antarctic."

"TELL THEM HOW NATURAL, SENSIBLE, NORMAL IS HUMAN KINDNESS. TELL THEM, THOSE WHO JUDGE MY COUNTRY, AFRICA, BY GAIN AND GREED, THAT THE GODS WALK ABOUT HER BAREFOOT WITH NO ERMINE AND GOLD-STUDDED CLOAKS"

"I feel in my heart that our Pharaoh has already been born. It may be that I shall not live to see Pharaoh's day but I want all those who now live in anguish to be comforted. For one day, due to the length of his roots and the depth of his wisdom, all nations shall dwell under his shadow."

"You have a beautiful soul that was nurtured on a dung heap."

"I was thinking a while ago, Johnny, that half the trouble in the world is caused by the difficulty we have in communicating with each other. It's practically impossible to say what you really mean and to be sure that the other person is understanding you. Word communication is dependent on reason and logic but there are many things in life that are not reasonable or logical. A jazz musician can say something to me in his music but it would be quite beyond me to translate into words what he is communicating through music. What he has to say touches the most vital part of my life but I can only acknowledge his message silently."

"Do you think life will care about you if you do not show that you care about it?"

"They pursued their love with a wild abandon, unprotected against the treachery of the insecure foundation on which it was based and too young to bridge the gap that would suddenly and unexpectedly fling them miles apart."

"People don't fall in love these days. The movies have made that kind of thing stale. They have robbed us of our capacity to feel through feeding us with cheap sensation. Ask any man and he will tell you that he can't kiss his wife because she wants him to kiss her the way Richard Widmark kisses."

"The whole principle of living and learning is dependent on what is going on in the mind. The mind is like a huge, living tapestry. Everything we see, hear, learn and experience gets being imprinted on it. As we grow we begin to see that we can correlate those impressions into a definite pattern and so we call that our life."

"Life's one hell of a joke. It dresses us up with insatiable yearnings and high-flying ambitions and then flings the fact of our insignificance in our faces. Half of us fall for the joke and start the mad rush after the big prizes. Some, like you and me can't fall for the joke. We've been hit too hard at too early an age."

"Above all the necessities of life, human beings need love and it is often the one thing most denied to them."

"You are young and might prefer to believe that love is moonlight and rosy sunsets. It is not. It is brutal, violent, ugly, possessive and dictatorial. It makes no allowances for the freedom and individuality of the loved one. Lovers become one closely knit unit in thought and feeling. Should you eventually find that this love is beyond your capacity or that you cannot rise to its demands, you may leave but please make sure that you go to some place where I will never be able to find you."

"Once a man involves himself with women there's always some kind of retribution. They're the most vengeful creatures on this earth."

"There's only one way to make yourself shock-proof. Do not be impressed by evil and do not be impressed by good."

"The task of the writer is to serve humanity and not party politicians and their temporary fixations. But it's a hard path to follow. I'm having headaches over it because I'm too intensely aware of the pressures and issues and yet at the same time wish to retain my right to think for myself."

"She was hardly conscious of her agonised cry as his hard kisses ravaged her mouth. For her it was like a dissolution of body and bones; with only a heart left; a pulsing heart awash in an ocean of rushing tornadic darkness; helpless at its own forward rushing..."

"Life is not in bits and pieces. It is a magnificent, rhythmic, pulsating symphony."

"Life is a treacherous quicksand with no guarantee of safety anywhere. We can only try to grab what happiness we can before we are swept off into oblivion."

"Not now, not ever, shall I be complete; and though the road to find you has been desolate with loneliness, still more desolate is the road that leads away from you. It is as though pain piles on pain in an endless, unbroken stream, until it is the only reality. What do they do, those who love?"

"The only reason why I always admit pain is that it seems the only constructive emotion."

"A basically timid and cowardly person dare not presume to speak for others. He can only speak for himself. [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,"

"There were once highway robbers, who said: 'Your money or your life!' Today, they say: 'Your politics or your life!' [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,"

"Who am I? What am I? In past and present, the answer lies in Africa; in part it lies within the whole timeless, limitless, eternal universe. How can I discover the meaning and purpose of my country if I do not first discover the meaning and purpose of my own life? Today there are a thousand labels. One of them is 'crazy crank'. I do not mind being a 'crazy crank', as long as I am sure that I am a crank of my own making, as long as I resist environmental, societal, and political attempts to control and suppress my mind. [A Personal View of the Survival of the Unfittest,"

"All life flows continuously like water in the stream and I am only some of the water in the stream, never able to gauge my depth. The hours, the years, the eternities slip by too quickly, moving, changing, never the same thing. I move with this current to the ocean only to be flung back again to the stream. The cycle seems unending, repetitive. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"The holy order of doing the right thing is incompatible with love, which does all the wrong things. Love can never learn to choose the woman who has the highest price, or whose father possesses the greatest number of cattle. Love strikes the outcast, the beggar, the stranger, and leaves the dull, dead, complacent conformer to his safety. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"The body is a positive thing, and love without a body is negative, useless, purposeless. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

"A woman is a maker of pottery, feeling life with her hands, keeping it whole, moulding it from the depths upwards. Her vision is constant, unchanging. [Where is the Hour of the Beautiful Dancing of Birds in the Sun-wind?,"

""The philosophy of love and peace strangely overlooked who was in possession of the guns…The contradictions were apparent to Makhaya, and perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ. It seemed to Makhaya far preferable for Africa if it did without Christianity and Christian double-talk, fat priests, golden images, and looked around at all the thin naked old men who sat under trees weaving baskets with shaking hands. People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that.”"

"MakhayaMaseko’s quest is to find inner peace of mind by a constructive engagement with the social world and in the world of GolemaMmidi, these desires are offered fulfilment"

"“It’s Zulu … I am a Zulu. And he laughed sarcastically at the thought of calling himself a Zulu"

"“the poverty and tribalism of Africa [are] a blessing if people [can] develop, sharing everythingwith each other"

"…the Tswana language [like] the bush, [belongs] to all Batswana people"

"Head’s contention is that socially ascribed identities arefalse, misleading and degrading to the true inner person"

"“they cannot exist unless they can live in the village insuch a way that the changes that they bring about are necessary … in determining who they are"

"it would seem to suggest that Africanness is not a natural state of existence, [but that] it must be performed"

"I think there's something very special about women writers, black women writers in America and those that I know of in any real sense in Africa-Bessie Head, for example, in Africa or Gloria Naylor here. There's a gaze that women writers seem to have that is quite fascinating to me because they tend not to be interested in confrontations with white men-the confrontation between black women and white men is not very important, it doesn't center the text. There are more important ones for them and their look, their gaze of the text is unblinking and wide and very steady. It's not narrow, it's very probing and it does not flinch. And it doesn't have these funny little axes to grind. There's something really marvelous about that."

"I asked Bessie Head why a writer of such renown as she chose to remain in an isolated village, with no telephone, few modern conveniences, remote from the culture of cities. She told me Serowe suited her literary themes. She came from a humble background, she said, and preferred ordinary people. Powerful people, she went on, tended to be domineering; they don't pay their bills. The village people, she said, pay their bills "meticulously." "I have the courtesies, and love, of the people," she said. "What other life can I live?""

"Bessie Head: I found her novels very, very gripping, fascinating, challenging, really intellectually intriguing."

"“I once sat down on a bench at Cape Town railway station where the notice "Whites Only" was obscured. A few moments later a white man approached and shouted: 'Get off!' It never occurred to him that he was achieving the opposite of his dreams of superiority and had become a living object of contempt, that human beings, when they are human, dare not conduct themselves in such ways.”"

"“It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.”"

"“The whole village was involved. There was no longer buzz, buzz, buzz. Something they liked as Africans to pretend themselves incapable of-- being oppressive and prejudiced-- was being exposed. They always knew it was there but no oppressor believes in his oppression.”"

"“A discipline I have observed is an attitude of love and reverence to people.”"

"“And if the white man thought that Asians were a low, filthy nation, Asians could still smile with relief – at least, they were not Africans. And if the white man thought Africans were a low, filthy nation, Africans in Southern Africa could still smile – at least, they were not Bushmen.”"

"“Love is mutually feeding each other, not one living on another like a ghoul.”"

"“…This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that.”"

"I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.”"

"“Poverty has a home in Africalike a quiet second skin.It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with unconscious dignity.”"

"“Before the white man became universally disliked for his mental outlook, it was there. The white man found only too many people who looked different. That was all that outraged the receivers of his discrimination, that he applied the technique of the wild jiggling dance and the rattling tin cans to anyone who was not a white man.”"

"“When no one wanted to bury a dead body, they called the missionaries; not that the missionaries really liked to be involved with mankind, but that they had been known to go into queer places because of their occupation. They would do that but they did not often like you to walk into their yard. They preferred to talk to you outside the fence.”"

"“There was something Dikeledi called sham. It made people believe they were more important than the normal image of humankind. She had grown up surrounded by sham.”"

"“At such times he would think, "What will I do if she does not love me as much as I love her?" A terrible reply came from his heart, 'Kill her.”"

"“The man who slowly walked away from them was a king in their society. A day had come when he had decided that he did not need any kingship other than the kind of wife everybody would loathe from the bottom of their hearts.”"

"“The contradictions were apparent to Makhaya, and perhaps there was no greater crime as yet than all the lies Western civilization had told in the name of Jesus Christ. It seemed to Makhaya far preferable for Africa if it did without Christianity and Christian double-talk, fat priests, golden images, and looked around at all the thin naked old men who sat under trees weaving baskets with shaking hands. People could do without religions and Gods who died for the sins of the world and thereby left men without any feeling of self-responsibility for the crimes they committed. This seemed to Makhaya the greatest irony of Christianity. It meant that a white man could forever go on slaughtering black men simply because Jesus Christ would save him from his sins. Africa could do without a religion like that. 135”"

"“That is, adoration was patient and waiting while love or, if you liked, plain sexual passion banged everything about. It either shouted or thought it knew too much, and it had always left him cold and had not involved his heart. Therefore, if he wanted to get involved now it would be on his own terms and at his own pace.”"

"“Dikeledi could make no secret of the fact that, in relation to men, she often suffered from high blood pressure, except that the trouble with the bloodstream had eventually boiled down to one, unattainable man.”"

"once you make yourself a freak and special any bastard starts to use you. That's half of the fierce fight in Africa'"

"“Maybe he concentrated on his immediate situation. It was African. It was horrible. But wherever mankind had gathered itself into a social order, the same things were happening. There was a mass of people with no humnaity to whom another mass referred: Why, they are naturally like that. They like to live in such filth. They have been doing it for centuries”"

"“The wind of freedom, which was blowing throughout the world for all people, turned and flowed into the room. As they breathed in the fresh, clear air their humanity awakened. They examined their condition. There was the foetid air, the excreta and the horror of being an oddity of the human race, with half the head of a man and half the body of a donkey. They laughed in an embarrassed way, scratching their heads. How had they fallen into this condition when, indeed, they were as human as everyone else? They started to run out into the sunlight, then they turned and looked at the dark, small room. They said: "We are not going back there.”"

"I'm a poet. I distrust anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop because people don't think in full, clear sentences."

"And everyone wants to know: Who? Why? The victims ask the hardest of all the questions: How is it possible that the person I loved so much lit no spark of humanity in you?"

"By not dealing with past human rights violations, we are not simply protecting the perpetrators' trivial old age ; we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

"It's hard for me to speak, whether in English or Afrikaans. The reason I write is because I cannot speak. I feel blunt."

"Life ought to be about living beyond one self and that despite our own challenges in life."

"[On being exiled in London in 1964, aged 12] I was a white South African kid who came from a lot of stress, given that my father had disappeared and we didn't know where he was, and my mother had been in prison. It was a relief to be in England but I had never taken a bus on my own. To learn to find my own way was quite a difficult thing to do."

"The consequences of marginalizing people on the basis of what they wear or what they say is very dangerous."

"“The actions of al-Qaeda or Islamic State can force our governments, and some of us, to give up on some of the hard-won democratic rights which is what makes us different from them. I’m talking about all sorts of things, freedom of expression being one of the most important ones.”"

"“If our response is to stop people in our societies from saying things they don’t want us to say, we are falling into their trap"

"“In the same way, one of the things in common from these very different people who went to Islamic State is the feeling that they don’t know where they belong, they are looking for a sense of belonging and they wrongly think they will only find that in this mythical caliphate that they think has been established.”"

"Anyone feeling vulnerable can feel attracted to the “idealistic world"

"The problem is that it’s all fake because they only respect women’s bodies by restricting them to the house and forcing them to cover up, which is not the same as someone choosing to cover up.”"

"it appears that the appeal is not so much the religious rhetoric but the promise of an alternative to capitalism."

"“When you write a memoir you have to think about your responsibility to your audience that you’d be completely honest, and to people in your life. Your honesty is going to affect them.”"

"“ask questions that they might not be asking of themselves” because as she says,"

"Let me tell you for nothing it was a great relief to find all my toes in the right order and with the right amount of skin and bone. You miss them fierce when you don’t have them."

"I had just sat on the edge of the river with my knees right up against my chest and cried because ten is too young to know that sometimes your parents have to do what’s best for you even if it hurts you. Even if it hurts them."

"I breathed in the smoke from my final cigarette. It tasted like acceptance of growing up."

"The Worme Bridge’ stood out for us with its brave story and clear, distinctive voice; it’s a wonderfully dark exploration of the water theme. The story works effortlessly to construct an other kind of reality while grounding itself in the real world. The writing is compelling: the reader is drawn into this family and the strangeness that overtakes them. We found this a powerful piece of writing that continues to haunt the reader afterwards."

"To write was a need; I had to write down messages, to tell apartheid's horrors."

"I always imagined poetry is supposed to be beauty, about beauty and pleasant things. Well I sat in a train one day and saw this lorry full of furniture going, coming here... and I wrote a poem about Group Areas ‘Fall tomorrow.’ In the last stanza I wrote, that the government of that time is going to fall [ ]. This was about the anger. Bringing out all the anger of moving and seeing this people moving and seeing people breaking up their wardrobes and their cupboards because it can’tfit through the doors here."

"Rooted in Salt River, Simon’s Town and Ocean View, Gladys Thomas’s narration of the struggle of a nation for freedom challenged the construct of ‘forgotten communities’. She championed the tribulations and triumphs of people who did not have the means to tell their stories in the distinctive and memorable way in which she took up their plight."

"Winnie was a woman of her times, there was a war and she too was a soldier."

"You have been conniving and dishonest in appropriating a sentence from an entire article and placing it as a shout-out for a book that YOU MUST HAVE KNOWN, was the antithesis of what I believe and the complexity that I embrace when analysing historical figures."

"My whole life has felt like a long deeply unsatisfying love affair with my mother. She is the beloved who doesn't love back."

"I wanted my writing to offer an account of what it was like to take care of my mother, the details of that experience, the feelings, the lived experience. Women often do work like this that is unacknowledged, unseen. So, I guess I wanted to make it visible – not just my work, but this kind of work of taking care of elderly parents, of a child."

"I believe if we know about one another, and focus more on how we are the same rather than how different, we will be less inclined to prove that we have all the right answers, and get on with the real business of living."

"Human is human. We’re blood, bone, emotion, piss, shit, love. Skin colour shouldn’t be what trips you up as a writer – it’s just skin after all, it’s our experiences while we’re here that are important, and all human beings, regardless of race, are equipped with the capacity for empathy and understanding."

"First rule of writing is to read everything you can get your hands on to fill your head with ideas. And then, once you have your story down, let it rest. Then revise, revise, revise."

"We used to believe that the highway went somewhere, that over the horizon was escape, places we'd never been and thought we wanted to go."

"Joe Saviour once told me that every life has a legend. Before the soul comes down to earth, God seals a story inside it. To know your purpose, you need to unravel the mystery of that legend."

"Shame-shame, Thuli's shame, all the same, shame-shame."

"Sizane, you gave your girls the wrong names. Thulisile means 'quiet one' but she talks, talks, talks..."

"Mt. Everest is now the wealthy executive’s midlife crises."

"That thing you did 10 years ago that was significant everyone is doing it now. The thing you did a year ago, you’ve been copied"

"It is about what is happening within the group of people you have chosen to go with. The teams who failed, very few of them where actually stopped by the mountain. Even the ones caught in the storm they made complacent mistakes that made them vulnerable when things went wrong and then the teams that succeed it’s about the set of intangible tools a real clarity of purpose for your team"

"You only have your word The physical wounds heal. You don’t carry around the evidence the way you would if you had lost your leg or your arm in Afghanistan."

"When someone says I was merely groped, I don't forget. And I don't forgive that the truth would be adjusted and then rewritten over time and eventually lost."

"Darwin was hired by somebody to come up with a theory [...] Does anyone know who employed Darwin, Where Darwinism comes from? Look it up; the Rothschilds. It goes back to 10 Downing street. The same people who employed Darwin and his theory of evolution and so on and so on."

"God believes in sovereignty and national identity and the sanctity of family, and all the things that we’ve lived with from the beginning of time. And he knows that the open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world through all of these people who are his stooges and his servants."

"And they may think that they're going to become gods. That's what they tell us...You know, the ones who want us eating insects, cockroaches and that while they dine on the blood of children? Those are the people, right? They’re not going to win. They’re not going to win."

"If you want to know why it's called social media, [...] I’ll tell you why: Because Karl Marx was hired by Henry Rothschild, by the Rothschild family, to develop a system of social control. So when you see social, it is a form of control—that’s all it is. Social media is a form of controlling us all."

"There’s a code of silence about it that I think is in Lara’s interest and in our interest to break"

"Logan said she was separated from her handlers and then assaulted by a mob of men who ripped off her clothes and groped her."

"We all have those roads-in-the-yellow-wood dudes –the unready loves who left us, or we left. Sometimes, in the small, shuddery hours, they come back. I think about them; I’m glad I knew them. Life is long. If you’re lucky."

"Novels are the most terrifying of the forms, apart from screenplays (which are basically the haiku of the fiction world, and which is why the good ones are hardly ever written by just one person)."

"Writing is an aptitude. Sometimes you have more time and inclination for it, and sometimes you have children."

"We steal; we hoard; we like the sounds of our own voices."

"We all experience longing and magic, but we aren’t always good at knowing when they’re happening to us. Longing and magic don’t go away because we get older or more disappointed with our circumstances and selves."

"Middle-aged love is so devastating because this time round, you know exactly what’s at stake! Old-aged love is going to knock your thrombosis socks clean off!"

"The archaeology of aging is so interesting – what people think they are allowed to do; what they actually can do."

"Don’t do it. But also: if you want to, you will."

"If I don’t write down what I’ve witnessed, who will? We can easily say we can’t look at this stuff, we can’t record it because it’s too shocking, but then what happens is there’s this silence, there’s this lacuna around it and it disappears."

"It’s a thing that requires complexity, people’s sexualities are very complex. There can be great desire in submission. It’s the image making and then the reduction of a full human response to this two-dimensional thing."

"In fiction you have the mind, the interiority of the person, and the action happening at the same time. But I agree with you, they’re such different forms."

"There was such a sense of liberation and opening that sort of space that had been closed off so completely under Apartheid – no light, no oxygen – it really opened and expanded and into that came so much publishing and writing."

"I think we keep the secrets from ourselves. Because we have experienced a moment when you look into a person’s eyes and you see that how they are looking at you is dehumanising. In that moment, all your humanity is lost. And it’s unbearable. We keep that secret from our daughters, because we don’t want them to be seen in that way."

"The heart is blind. You can’t love unless you have the heart of a child. It’s beautiful, but it’s the thing that makes you vulnerable. And when this connects with the secrets you hold, it can create a distortion in the psyche."

"With language and art, we can restore something that has been erased. It’s a way of saying the unsayable, of restoring humanity."

"Our culture works with ways of looking. If you think of the colonial gaze — the scopic power is masculine. You see it. You take it. It’s yours. We learn to reflect this gaze back on to ourselves as women when we look at ourselves in that objectifying way."

"When I wrote Love and Courage, the Story of Insubordination, I was not just telling the story of some isolated individual operating in a bubble. It was really about my learning about the power of love and how to connect, to draw courage and be insubordinate, to injustice and to systems of injustice"

"My father used to say the person who writes the story shapes our consciousness. So it’s not just about whose stories get told, but it’s about if you are writing the story yourself, if it’s your story, if it’s your experience, the power of that is enormous. Because our stories have been written for us and they’ve been re-written. And many times we’ve been written out."

"When we were fighting against apartheid, we recognised it wasn’t just a racist state. It was a racist, capitalist and patriarchal state. And we have to understand that. So how do we actually fight against that? How do we change that"

"It’s really people who exploit the earth and humanity with fairly little consequence and then set themselves up as the people with the solution or who will fund the solutions"

"Power Systems work to fragment us. They fragment us as individual beings. And they set up these hierarchies – the hierarchy of the body, mind, heart, spirit; hierarchies of race, colour, and gender, and they set up these divisions within and between us"

"That’s how Power Systems work. They set up divisions between us. One of the most powerful things is reclaiming that connection"

"Share [your] personal intergenerational stories of [your] forebears who had defied race, culture, gender and power"

"In our country, as in all others, rape and sexual assault have been interwoven into wars of patriarchal conquest and colonisation, genocide, slavery, apartheid and capitalism. Religious texts justify violence against women and children"

"God is male – male is god’ is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Those taught to be subordinate are female and those taught to expect subordination are male. The world order mirrors apartheid and has deepened inequality and poverty. Economic, military and religious fundamentalism have increased vulnerability to misogyny, and rape and sexual abuse will affect an estimated one billion women and girls over their lifetimes"

"This is where depression regularly ends in suicide and there is no place to run for women, girls, transgendered and gender non-conforming people"

"The impending destruction of humanity and our planet, presented by climate scientists, does not penetrate the thick wall of denial and inaction, with devastating consequences for people who are poor, especially women"

"I want to incite insubordination against this in each of us. Like you, I have felt the fear and hate of subordination land on my skin, course through my blood, unsettle my nerves… its paralysis, impotent rage and helplessness"

"There is wisdom in the everyday beauty of fragile complex beings grappling with contradiction"

"We can reclaim ourselves by recognising that love is intrinsic to our being. From it we can invoke the courage to dance with our fear"

"Some people said that apartheid disappeared after removing the signs that said ‘non-Europeans’ … but the structural institutional roots of it remained. When we begin to get insubordinate, we begin to get to the roots of things. Oppressive systems thrive in our subordination"

"It’s about harnessing the power we all have within us and begin to practise moving that power. It’s about seeing the dignity in others and [seeing how] the quality of what we create together becomes substantially different"

"Without seeing the dignity in those who bear the brunt of gender-based violence, the result will be a narrow focus on the criminal justice system and not the root causes of the problem, and how we have to address this to change the reality of our own country and our world"

"From love we can invoke the courage to dance with our fear. Inherent dignity is our individual and collective birth right that underpins substantive rights. When we forget our birth right, as we often do, we can look in the mirror of ourselves, of each other, or let the rising sun remind us of the radiance we were born with"

"We’re living in a time where changing technology challenges us to stay relevant almost on a daily basis."

"Without a doubt the power the internet gives to the average individual is challenging all sorts of gatekeepers for better or worse. People can now contribute to reporting by means of cellphone photographs/video and the secrets of politicians are now open for all to see through WikiLeaks; but at the same time, one can also read nauseating hate speak, prejudice and uninformed opinion on online fora and news page comment facilities. And, frankly, that open access is a double-edged sword."

"I was a solitary child who lived in a world of words and music, of imagination and the arts and I felt keenly the vast divide between myself and the children about me. It felt very much as if I’d been absent on the day they gave out the handbook on how to relate to other children and how to be a part of the group. It was only as an adult that I found other people who saw and experienced the world as I do."

"The first poem in my childhood notebook was written when I was eleven. It was a poem about the conflict I felt when my cat had slaughtered a bird. I don’t remember much about my writing before then, just that I always escaped into words."

"I remember being read to as a child. I read to my own son every night until he was able to read books for himself. I confess that I enjoyed it as much as he did. I did all the voices."

"My mother started her Eng Lit studies when I was nine, which continued until she got her doctorate when I was in high school, so our house was filled with literature. Literally. Piles of books and the sound of method actors intoning on vinyl. I grew up saturated in words – I remember everything from Shakespeare, Hopkins and Chaucer to Bosman, Conrad and Plath. Unisa was very tolerant. I’d sit quietly at the back of lectures and seminars and drink it all in. It was a rich childhood."

"The eighties were exciting and challenging times to work in the theatre, particularly at the Market. I worked under Mannie Manim, with John Kani and with Alan Joseph, who is greatly missed. We were pushing the envelope all the time, challenging the government. I worked with Athol Fugard on two productions. He was a very private person with a delicious laugh. I’ll never forget Janet Suzman’s Othello with John Kani and Joanna Weinberg in the lead roles—Across the colour bar, In bed together, Kaal, Sowaar! Imagine! The Market staff could swear that throughout the run, security police got to see a lot of Shakespeare. Which was a good thing."

"Festival time in Grahamstown is always reunion time—I see many of the actors I used to work with. I saw Janet Suzman this year, and I see Mannie Manim from time to time. Every year I see Mandie van der Spuy, who headed Drama at PACT when I was there and now manages Standard Bank’s jazz sponsorship. And of course, I see Lynnie Marais very often in Grahamstown—she moved from PACT to the Monument to head up the festival many years ago."

"What I really appreciate about working with homeless people is that when you get to that basic level of survival, all the human pretence is stripped away. There is no bullshit. You are who you are."

"The most important part of my ministry to homeless people was knowing their names and their stories and loving them just as they were. Counselling the homeless couple whose baby died before his first birthday. Listening to yet another long, wheedling scam story from a guy asking for money for a train trip to a new job. Laughing with him that he thought the story would actually work on me. And then helping him in ways that were better than giving him money to buy skokiaan at the shebeen on the streets amongst the corporate headquarters in Rosebank."

"Love God with everything you have and everything you are, and love those around you as you love yourself. The rest is just detail."

"Development Theology explores how God sees the poor, what the Bible has to say on the subject, and how we, as a people of God, respond to the development needs around us as an expression of the love of God for his people. I believe that the church has a vital and practical role to play in binding up the broken hearts of the poor and in rebuilding the nation. I am so passionate about this that I set my life aside for this work as an Anglican priest."

"I love Grahamstown. I wanted to move here years ago when I was a theatre publicist, but the time wasn’t right. When my son was awarded scholarships to St Andrews College three years ago I jumped at the chance to move down. My friends thought I would struggle to settle down in a small town, but I’m a very gregarious person. I love having four people hoot “Hello” as I walk down High Street. I am guaranteed to meet at least five friends or colleagues when I go to Pick ‘n Pay, which is our village marketplace."

"Some people find the goldfish bowl difficult to live in – I thrive in it. There is no peak hour traffic. The cathedral bells ring on Sunday and Thursday evenings in the mist. The sunsets are spectacular. You can find a donkey cart (with a set of donkeys) parked neatly in a bay between a BMW and a Golf, and there are often cattle in my street. Cattle have right of way."

"Someone has to do something about the pain and the poverty, and I’ve been given a good set of resources to do it. So I get stuck in and I get very motivated by watching the change take place in people’s lives."

"I married very young – to a brilliant and immensely destructive man whom I met at university. Twelve years of that marriage nearly destroyed me. I chose to end the marriage and to survive."

"As I grew in my spiritual journey and I came to know what true and unconditional love was, I came to see that what I had was not what marriage should be. I chose life. I staggered/crawled away from the devastation and it took years for me slowly to become the person I was meant to be. And life has been deeply rich and rewarding in every possible way since then."

"God is a great recycler – he took a broken, shattered woman and slowly breathed life into her again. I began to trust people enough to make some wonderful friends. I began to believe in myself again."

"The most important thing I’ve learned from motherhood is to love your family and your friends as much as you can and let them know as often as you can. Parenting keeps you humble and grounded."

"As a poet, I am as I am in every other sphere of life. I’m real and flesh and blood. I don’t write to impress people or use clever allusions or references. I did all that when I was still at university, and it was rubbish poetry. Now I write only because the poem needs to be written. And it has its own life and its own personality—with its whimsical little in-jokes and its musicality. And if someone else likes the poem, then it’s probably because, at the bottom of it all, we have a shared human experience."

"When I was a child I used to say, “I am going to write a poem”, and my mother would ask me what it would be about, and I wouldn’t know until it was done. I’d just have a welling-up pregnant feeling inside me. That still happens."

"It is a first collection, and there are no South African publishing houses that can afford to take risks on poetry collections anymore, let alone new poets. I believed in the work and wanted to put it out there."

"There were times during my marriage that I wanted it all to end. I wrote a poem in one of my most tortured moments about the peace I would find if I walked into the sea and breathed. It was years later that I realised how close my life story was to Ingrid Jonker’s. I had been born just after she died. Somehow, I survived, against all odds. I felt connected with her, and wrote about it. I like to think that she knows that I wrote about it."

"I feel injustice deeply. I thought I would get over that as I grew up. I never have. That’s how “Nam” was written. Both of those incidents happened to me just as they are written, and I was unable to forget them. And when I saw the facile comments on the travel show, I had to put my anger down on paper. It just never ends. We don’t learn. As a mother I am now even more outraged by senseless slaughter ordered by men who are never themselves in danger. And whose motives are based on greed and power-seeking."

"People have responded that the collection chronicles a journey through suffering into new life, and that it was thought-provoking. And that is what I wanted to express. That there is hope for new growth, for freedom, for change. For so many people who have suffered. And especially for our country. I really believe that."

"What excites me? Now that I am beloved, I am a joyful and irrepressible woman, I do not laugh quietly and I’m always the last person on the dance floor at one in the morning at university functions. And I am not waiting to be old to wear purple. What inspires me? Humble people who just get on with helping to make a difference in this world. And who do it out of love, not self. So often people help others for reasons that have everything to do with themselves and nothing to do with those they are helping."

"To go back to Venice. My son Michael and I backpacked for three weeks across Italy four years ago, staying in youth hostels. Italy was rewarding beyond description, but Venice was a moving and intense experience. It was fading and old and beautiful and I loved it. I would go back there given half a chance."

"Two years ago, I began to speak to friends who were editors of poetry journals, to get an idea of what was involved. I made the financial decision to go online with a simple, quality website. I do the html coding myself, so it costs me two weekends a year, with no overheads other than the cost of bandwidth. The benefit of online is that I can use images as well, and allow them to interact with the poetry – which has fascinating results."

"We live in a different time than we lived in a year ago. And I wish we were sitting here talking about this dystopian fictional world, and how glad we are that we’re not intent."

"Christian idea of sin — that tragic flaw at the core of human experience provides one of the best tools for understanding the evils of sexism, patriarchy, and traditional sin-talk itself."

"Gender violence should be seen as a patriarchy control mechanism, since it is systemic and rooted in sexist cultural practices and perspectives and it leads women to adjust behavior in order to avoid violence"

"I hope of course that the women will be inspired by the lessons offered by those who are walking the path with them, and that networks of solidarity and connection would develop from this meeting. Practically, I am keen to work on a publication that would capture the insights and wisdom that emerged from the gathering"

"Equip yourself. I believe that knowledge is power. If you want to engage power and authority you need to equip yourself with knowledge. Don’t be ashamed of the knowledge that lives in your body. Equip yourself with book knowledge but also embodied knowledge."

"I went to stay with an older sister who lived in better circumstances. Her son was only three years younger than me so I essentially became like a daughter in the house."

"I became an overachiever because of my experiences of the mud. So I feel that my roots are firmly in the mud because those are the experiences that shape me…I hold the commitments that I have to gender justice, social transformation, to economic justice for women in particular…because of, and not in spite of, the muddy experiences."

"I confronted the man who had abused me. He denied abusing me, so I took him to court."

"I wake up at 4am every day; that is my work ethic. There are many things stacked against women in the workplace so we have to work doubly hard to prove ourselves."

"You have to build your own confidence and you need to do what you are passionate about, that job you would still do even if you were not getting paid to do it."

"We were some of the experimental kids of the new rainbow nation and we battled a lot"

"I think it gave me my voice because I learned very quickly there isn’t a lot of help. We learned how to speak up for ourselves and how to identify micro-aggressions."

"I think it’s easy to see when someone says the k-word or when someone is outwardly racist. Micro-aggressions are very difficult to pick up on."

"That’s what I try to do with Kelz – expose the racism that doesn’t sound like racism."

"I was like, if we are your friends and went to the same schools, why are these issues not important to you?"

"Because you will speak up about rhinos or puppies – of course you should – but why can’t you speak up about black people?"

"When you go to certain schools and live a certain life, you’re going to have blind spots. Kelz helps me identify my own blind spots"

"I understand being the first generation of black people who kind of made it out, my parents were very nervous about acting."

"The thing that helped most of their peers get out was business, medicine and law. And there weren’t a lot of artists in their spaces who were able to make the money they made and give their children what they gave their children."

"When I lived in South Africa, I was very nervous if people would laugh at me instead of with me."

"I’m not thin. Being in this industry and being told ‘it’s difficult to imagine you in any role because you’re not thin’ was quite frustrating."

"If you’re a chubby or plus-size girl or whatever you want to call it, you’re the comically funny friend. You’re always going to be that friend in the corner who’s like, ‘girrrl’ or whatever sassy little comment. It’s irritating."

"I’ve seen these people in the ANC who just don’t care about the issues that affect less privileged people because they don’t have to care,” Lesego says."

"I think the ANC can feature in those things even if they are made up of black people"

"It’s exciting and not even something I ever imagined, but it seems like a green light for me to proceed and achieve bigger things in my career"

"I do not think I was ready for it [going solo], but if you are someone on a journey to success you need to do something in order to move forward"

"I was scared at first, but I am just fortunate that I have positive people surrounding me who have always assured me that although I was leaving my comfort zone, I would still make it."

"Each morning the children had to pass the place of graves on their way to buy the day’s water and only last week another baby in the village had died. It was always scary seeing the little graves, but especially this fresh one now."

"The children finally find their mother, but their troubles are not yet over. Things are not as simple as they thought they would be. They have to stay with their new friend for the night, then travel back with their mother the next day."

"It isn’t until they reach the city that they come to understand the dangers of their country, and the painful struggle for freedom and dignity that is taking place all around them."

"A lie has seven winding paths, the truth one straight road."

"Where the water rules, the land submits."

"Allow bullies a stranglehold, they’ll have you by the throat!"

"... but I think few understand just what it takes to run a restaurant, keep a restaurant and look after 20 staff when you don't know what you're looking at... The conviviality of The Kitchen - I just knew it wasn't going to be the same again."

"I came to business as a creative... As time went on I had to learn how to make business work, that wonderful trifecta of having your systems and your creativity and joy and love connect in some way..."

"You have two layers: you have all the people you're looking after and then you have all the customers coming... There's a joy but also an obligation and a commitment to this life. And ultimately it was quite exhausting! I sometimes had to go home salary-less in December..."

"The most fun is when you're a small operation and you manage people's expectations... There's a joy there of being really clear about what it is that you're offering"

"The real challenge for the future is... how we feed people well and sustainably, and make money for everybody. There is enough"

"I went through a lot since Kgosi came onto this earth. I know a lot of people have been saying that I'm quiet... I haven't been feeling like making happy music. I have been making music and thank God that I can do that all the time,"

"But now I'm happier, I'm thinner, I'm sexier. When my son was born, I was at my heaviest, and I wasn't happy, I was performing because my songs were popping. The only thing that kept me going was because...my baby boy. Being a mom has just elevated me ... I want to be fit for myself."

"“I am the happiest I have ever been,” she tells me when I ask how she is."

"“I feel like life is good, I am truly blessed. I can’t complain.”"

"“Working with Beyoncé really did change my entire mindset. I realised that she’s in her late 30s and she is still in the game,”"

"“I wanted to be active with him, I want to take walks with him, I want to ride a bike, I wanted him to watch less TV,”"

"“I don’t know if other mothers can relate but after pregnancy and giving birth, everything felt mushy. Everything was soft. It was like I couldn’t walk or move like the way I used to before,”"

"“I felt that I could eat whatever I want, however I wanted and whenever I wanted and it was fine because I just had a baby,”"

"“I try to speak with my friends and my family, I went into therapy, and I use the gym also as a way to listen to my own thoughts. I spend a lot of time talking to my son as well. He surprises me when he talks about me or when we are sharing thoughts, he also gives me a lot of enlightenment,”"

"She would fulfil her obligations as she understood them and provide for them. The only way she could be a mother to her children, she saw, would be to leave them"

"Instead of being kind and buying this and that for the maid, just translate the kindness to this woman’s wages […]"

"once the white child reaches the age of five and has to start school, the black child becomes an embarrassment, a visible reminder of the inequalities endemic in the society"

"the morning paper, the Cape Times, carried the story of the child murdered on the beach. Front page, the story made"

"Today, no one knows the name of the little girl found in a rubbish drum at the back of the butcher’s shop. They don’t know it today, for they never knew it then"

"Now that the pass has gone"

"There are not enough mothers during the day to force the children to go to school and stay there for the whole day. The mothers are at work. Or they are drunk. Defeated by life. Dead. We die young, these days."

"Yet, even today we still laugh sad laughs, remembering our innocent incredulity. Our inability to imagine certain forms of evil, the scope and depth of some strains of ruthlessness. We laugh, to hide the gaping hole where our hearts used to be. Guguletu killed us . . . killed the thing that held us together . . . made us human. Yet, we still laugh."

"Mxolisi turned one year. A part of me hated him. Not him . . . but what he was . . . had been . . . the effect he seemed to have on my life. Always negative, always cheating me of something I desperately wanted. I shrunk; because he was."

"Unganyebelezeli, kuza kudlalwa!’ piped Mxolisi’s little voice, calling for daring and defiance. To look at him do the war cry of the Comrades, poised in a defiant stance, his tiny fist up in the air, couldn’t but send all those who heard him into paroxysms of laughter."

"There was nothing unusual about this. Mxolisi, now four years old, could already tell the difference between the bang! of a gun firing and the Gooph! of a burning skull cracking, the brain exploding."

"No,’ the girl’s mother said quietly. ‘There were many people there. Looking. Some were even laughing. None stopped the crime, none. Until your son arrived on the scene."

"Yes, Mzukulwana,’ he sighed, ‘the biggest storm is still here. It is in our hearts — the hearts of the people of this land. ‘For, let me tell you something, deep run the roots of hatred here. Deep. Deep. Deep."

"The sun went and died in the west."

"Tatomkhulu was a fund of facts that, although seemingly different, made a whole lot of sense of some of the things we learned at school. He explained what had seemed stupid decisions, and acts that had seemed indefensible became not only understandable but highly honourable."

"But now, my Sister-Mother, do I help him hide? Deliver him to the police? Get him a lawyer? Will that mean I do not feel your sorrow for your slain daughter? Am I your enemy? Are you mine? What wrong have I done you . . . or you me?"

"Your daughter. The imperfect atonement of her race. My son. The perfect host of the demons of his."

"She was not robbed. She was not raped. There was no quarrel. Only the eruption of a slow, simmering, seething rage. Bitterness burst and spilled her tender blood on the green autumn grass of a far-away land. Irredeemable blood. Irretrievable loss."

"One boy. Lost. Hopelessly lost. One girl, far away from home. The enactment of the deep, dark, private yearnings of a subjugated race. The consummation of inevitable senseless catastrophe."

"Botswana. It is not called Bechuanaland any more now."

"I can't stand those voices! Those baboons there, sitting there talking."

"It was no use trying to speak to him. The long painful years of contact with the whites had developed within him a hard protective core of indifference to all their constant abusive reprimands. He was dead inside, I thought."

"Don't call me Nanny, your Nanny is looking after your kids at your house."

"For him as well as Aggripa, this is home. Adam will only leave here when he's a corpse. Where can he go to? He is a "foreign native", a Rhodesian. He has to remain tied to Mr Block for the rest of his life like a slave; he has been sold to him and may not leave him for another master. At least I'm free."

"And I thought to myself, to think that my poor little niece is not even aware that she is so important. That her innocent request to pay me a visit can be regarded as a threat to the security of the great Republic of South Africa."

"These damnable laws which dictate to you where, and next to whom, you shall walk, sit, stand and lie... This whole abominable nauseating business of toilets and "separate but equal facilities"... What is one to do anyway? One is forever in a trap from which there is no escape... except suicide..."

"My handwriting had never looked so beautiful. I had at last decided to free myself of the shackles which had bound not only my hands, but also my soul."

"But memories got left behind while you kept walking on; every time you had to retrace your steps further to return to your memories, and sometimes it was better not to turn back at all."

"unhappiness was something you got used to or something that passed."

"...What was there to wish for... a wish asked for the unattainable. The impossible."

"God forgives many things, but God never forgives us the wrong we do to a child."

"Get your hands to work, Selling, none of us can understand it."

"To hear, after nine years, that they had found a child that might be yours, was not news that you could take lightly. And if it was the child they had found, only the Lord in Heaven could know how he had got over the mountain to the Long Kloof."

"What is it that is troubling you? You’re young, but your eyes are old."

"An ostrich took a mate for life. It was their nature. Why try and mess up nature? Was the new prosperity not enough for them? …Where would it end?"

"...the fruit of the vice, the folly, the thoughtlessness of the white man. In the old days - taking one aspect of the matter - there were colonists who, like the Biblical patriarchs or monarchs, had their official and their unofficial households, their white wives and their Hottentot hand-maids. But they used their slave-women as Abraham used Hagar rather than as Solomon used the Shulamite."

"We are all God's children.....Perhaps, we brown people are His stepchildren."

"And yet the less civilised white peasant of Europe is to this extent the coloured man's superior: the blood in him is stronger for advancement."

"Given the opportunity, the descendant of serfs may be a Tchekov. But the child of colour, unless his colour is attenuated to the verge of vanishing point, does not seem to have in him the ability to rise. It is as if the offspring of the originally mixed unions had, through generations, and through circumscription of life and interbreeding, achieved a definite, inferior, and static race: a race not given to wildness (its mothers were savages, but they were slaves); a race with something old and civilised about it (its fathers were Europeans); a race made up of weak materials and without the capacity for spiritual or intellectual growth."

"There are some who suggest that mixed breeds, unless replenished in a generation or two with the blood of one of the original stocks, tend to die out."

"....the whites are the conquerors and all is theirs. A man's one hope is among the whites.... The thing for the Buys-volk to do is to get back to the whites."

"From the day whe arrived at her husband's home, no one called her by her name."

"The women are experts at waiting - for husbands, for rain, for unborn children."

"Yet, he knew that he did not understand anything about the place or its people or its problems."

"He said it all depended on his employer; but what did his employer know about her, or her body or their need for a baby? How could he plan their life without them?"

"It galled him that anybody should think him inferior."

"Things in the country moved at a snail's pace, but they did arrive in the end, and when they did they would crash in fury over people's heads"

"In one convulsive moment Zenzile died."

"And we do not want passes. They have enslaved our men—and we do not want to carry them."

"Dear Apartheid Apologists, your time is over. You will not rule again. We do not fear you. Finally #TheLandIsOurs”."

"From a very early age I learnt to internalise, to project a very confident persona and be strong."

"I had to believe one day we would be free. The struggle became my motivation – that’s all I could hang on to."

"I like to define myself not according to what I have suffered but according to how much I have overcome, and I am very grateful to my mother for instilling that in both me and my sister… I never see a glass half empty but I see it half full."

"After our liberation she became an icon of the task we began of transforming our society and stepping into spaces and opportunities that had been denied to generations of South Africans."

"What she did, the sacrifices, the hardships she went through, the difficult life she led, we will forever be grateful because it was done so our people can be free."

"She carved her own path in life, and did things on her own terms."

"My first degree was in Journalism and English Literature so I have always had a strong interest in media. In my postgraduate work, I was soon drawn into archival research and working with old newspapers and magazines."

"My early research focused on questions of orality and literacy, an area that inevitably lead to scholarship on the early modern world and from there to the field of book history and print culture. I then began teaching a course on South African book history, edited a special issue of the South African Historical Journal on this theme and also began supervising graduates working on these themes."

"The Internet has created both possibilities and problems. There is now much more archival material online and an astonishing array of digital books. In my generation, part of one’s training was in how to locate material in obscure archives. That now seems a bit comical, given the easy access one can have to troves and troves of material. These developments do however mean that the materiality of the objects is often obscured. One can’t see the actual document so some of the key methods of book history can’t be deployed."

"In other words, we can – and to survive, we must – transform and even end within the next ten years the failed system of capitalism that now threatens to collapse earth’s life support systems and with them, human civilisation. We must replace that economic system with one that respects boundaries and limits; one that nurtures ‘soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity’;6 one that delivers social and economic justice."

"The reality is that, today, all states are embedded in, governed by and subject to the international system of mobile, volatile, private financial markets – a system that has indebted and impoverished the many and raised political tensions, as reflected in the rise of nationalism. Millions of voters understand the nature of globalization, even while dimly aware of the monetary, fiscal or trade theories on which the system is built. This public awareness explains why some electorates have backed the election of “strong men” – politicians who offer “protection” from the very global markets that have stripped economies of jobs and income, while enriching rentier capitalists."

"Social democracy’s blind spot for the international financial architecture and its power over domestic policy-making has had other consequences. Not only does neglect of the international system let globalized capital markets off the regulatory hook, but globalization has also led to the rise of economic nationalisms."

"Globalization represents the tragic reversal of all that Keynes hoped to achieve at Bretton Woods: an international framework that would end nationalisms, international trade competition, high levels of domestic unemployment, low levels of aggregate demand and the consequent debt deflation. It was an attempt by Keynes and other economists to prevent the return of nationalisms and fascism by developing policies that increased domestic demand not by boosting exports and raising demand externally but by raising living standards at home: an inter-national system that would restore policy autonomy to democratic states and stability to the world’s economies."

"I write furiously, admonishing myself when I seem about to fall into the old habit of editing sentences as they appear. I want to discover what it is I am going to be writing about, who is in the story and what they are doing there."

"Since I am a slow writer and a compulsive editor, I try not to stop too often"

"At the start of a new fiction project, there is always a piece written quickly, assuredly, with little hesitation, and with the euphoric feeling that comes with knowing one has found somewhere to begin"

"I asked her where the posters in his room came from. She told me she had found some magazines in the forest at a spot where some soldiers had camped and had brought them home. This was shortly before the sexual murders started. I believe those pin-ups were the catalyst that triggered the fantasy that had been brewing inside Zikode since his childhood. His mother had unwittingly lit the tinder which had erupted into a blaze and cost many women their lives."

"The motive is settled deep within the unconscious psyche, and the serial killer is unaware of this. By ‘irresistible compulsion’ I do not mean that serial killers have absolutely no power over the urge to kill. Many of them experience the urge as an external force taking control of their own will and forcing them to commit murder, a force they perceive they cannot resist."

"South Africa has the third highest murder rate in the world, with Colombia and Swaziland ahead of it. The high rate of murder illustrates the amount of work that a Murder and Robbery detective has to cope with, and yet South Africa holds the record for apprehending serial killers within three to six months of a special investigation team being established, provided the serial killer stays active."

"Every human being passes through five psychosexual developmental phases. They are the oral phase, anal phase, Oedipus or phallic phase, latency phase and the genital phase. A person can fixate in any of these phases and failure to resolve the fixation would be cause for pathology. A layman’s term for a fixation would be a mental short-circuit. It is an individualistic reaction to being exposed to too much or too little of something."

"I had never thought when I did my work that someone would make a TV series about it."

"I was recommended and appointed, as I was writing my doctorate thesis about serial killers."

"I was a tool to help them perform their job of catching criminals and when they saw that my contribution was valuable, they taught me about investigation for I knew nothing about it. In return, I taught them about profiling, and this is how this whole idea came about to train and teach them. I founded the Investigative Psychology Unit of the South African Police Service and worked actively with the detectives I trained."

"Good men and good women can stand together to fight injustice."

"It came after the weeks of intense classes that I conducted in order to teach detectives. There was also an advanced course. At the end of it, I told them “Well, what are you waiting for? Go catch me a killer!” This is how it became the title of the book."

"Since television series or films are often a dramatization of the events that happen in our lives, this has prompted me to launch my own YouTube Channel where I authentically speak about my experiences."

"One of the drawbacks we face today with the internet is the existence of clickbait or synthetic sensational information."

"As a professional psychologist, I therefore, through my YouTube Channel, offer authentic knowledge about forensic psychology. I want this platform to be inspirational and educational for everyone, free of cost and accessible."

"They are not Artificial Intelligence (AI)--generated monsters or Marvel comic book superheroes as often depicted in fictional series. The majority are not mentally ill. They are human beings, they could be your neighbour. Many people would presume that serial killers would be super intelligent, but they are not. They are normal people with average intelligence; few are intelligent and most are not."

"I am somewhere in Mauritius, for example, at the Odysseo oceanarium where one can see the sharks swimming with other fish. Now to us, it’s a dangerous shark but to the other fish, it’s just another fish. It is dangerous, but not a monster, just a fish. This is an analogy of how serial killers are, they move among us; just another person going about their daily lives."

"Having trained the detectives, I told them that if we think of serial killers as enemies, it will be difficult but if we understand them, we will be a step ahead and able to arrest them. But, it isn’t about just arresting them, it is about gathering evidence to get them convicted."

"I never told my family about the full nature of my work. Years later, my father read my book and he was shocked, saying that this was dangerous. I had to reassure him that it was all in the past, and I was now safe. I resigned from the police with the rank equivalent to senior superintendent in 2000."

"I am living from a place of healing."

"Serial killers are not monsters; they are human beings with tortured souls. I will never condone what they do, but I can understand them."

"Serial killers exist there, and if one really wants to find them, that is where one has to look. One cannot begin to understand a serial killer's mind if one is unprepared and if one does not know what they feel. One does not have to be raped to acquire empathy for a rape victim. I did not have to kill to understand why others do, but I had to go through some harrowing experiences in order to understand."

"Our hidden demons are simply the residue of perfectly ordinary and almost universal insecurity, self-doubt, and fear of failure. Maybe you still resent your sister for flirting with your boyfriends in high school. Maybe you feel undervalued by your new boss. This is not even the stuff of a good, tear-soaked Oprah episode. But it can be enough to hook you into behaving in ways that don’t serve you."

"In looking for the right places to make these tiny changes, there are three broad areas of opportunity. You can tweak your beliefs—or what psychologists call your mindset; you can tweak your motivations; and you can tweak your habits. When we learn how to make small changes in each of these areas, we set ourselves up to make profound, lasting change over the course of our lives."

"Life is full of diving boards and other precipices, but, as we’ve seen throughout this discussion of emotional agility, making the leap is not about ignoring, fixing, fighting, or controlling fear—or anything else you might be experiencing. Rather, it’s about accepting and noticing all your emotions and thoughts, viewing even the most powerful of them with compassion and curiosity, and then choosing courage over comfort in order to do whatever you’ve determined is most important to you. Courage, once again, is not the absence of fear."

"Perhaps the best term to describe living at the edge of our ability, thriving and flourishing, being challenged but not overwhelmed, is simply “whelmed.” And a key part of being whelmed lies in being selective in our commitments, which means taking on the challenges that really speak to you and that emerge from an awareness of your deepest values."

"In the same way, our suffering, our disengagement, our relationship challenges, and our other difficulties are almost never solved by thinking in the same old, automatic way. Being emotionally agile involves being sensitive to context and responding to the world as it is right now."

"Compassion gives us the freedom to redefine ourselves as well as the all-important freedom to fail, which contains within it the freedom to take the risks that allow us to be truly creative."

"It is a summer of songs composed in blood, tuned with guns and arranged in conversations. It is a summer of songs I sing in swelling volumes."

"I write poetry from my personal space, in my personal voice. I say “I am here”. I address women in the world."

"I first encountered your 2019 debut collection Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner (Modjaji Books) at the Rosebank branch of Exclusive Books. I spent so much time trying to read the two words on the cover, the ones in a small black font. After numerous failed attempts I decided I would use my magnifying glass when I got back home. It was in that moment that I realised: Oh, they are using the very cover to give me the visceral experience of what I am about to read! Then I thought: Effective! Smart! I love it! I am buying this book!"

"I was still in the queue at the bookshop when I read the contents page, and I began to smile, because Tongues of their Mothers—my second poetry collection—is also divided into four sections using the names of seasons. In your book, there are eleven poems in Winter, fifteen in Summer, three in Spring and thirteen in Autumn."

"These hands have Moulded monuments, created crafts, healed hearts."

"On the southern tip of Africa, the Western Cape faces its own questions of autonomy. With its unique cultural identity and starkly different economic and political realities compared to the rest of South Africa"

"One of the key reasons people across the world seek independence is the desire to protect their cultural heritage and identity."

"The path to independence is never easy, and it is often fraught with political obstacles. Puerto Rico’s referendum may not deliver a clear or immediate answer, just as the Western Cape’s future remains uncharted."

"But what is certain is that referendums, whether binding or not, are important barometers of political will. They provide a peaceful and democratic mechanism for expressing the people’s desires, and they can shift the course of history."

"The apparent aim of this paper is to reveal the contribution of archaeology to understanding the social relations of capitalism."

"The burden of this particular study of rural settlement in the Scottish Highlands is to show that archaeology helps to achieve a deeper understanding of the transition from clan ownership to individual ownership during the period of Improvement that heralded the dawn of the new commercial age in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."

"If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography … proves the point.”"

"The mores that I was used to were neither purely Western nor purely Bantu. We were not ‘black Europeans’, yet I saw how we were not ‘white Bantu’ either."

"Indeed how can they help being so, forced as they are by the present political dispensation to observe us from a distance, which distorts and throws little light on our lives as we live them?"

"It has been said that if you want the truth you should ask someone with Asperger syndrome. The only way he could understand the pain he had caused was to relate it back to something that might have made him feel inadequate and inferior. This was the only way he could comprehend what effect his words had had on her. As a consequence of this incident he became very careful about what he said in the future."

"It is easy for the NT partner to forget that her partner may not know what it is he should say or how he should respond to a given situation."

"They want their partners to intuitively know and understand what is required of them. They want to feel their partners understand their needs and desires without having to spell it out to them time after time."

"People don't want novelty – they want the reassurance of familiarity. No-one wants to be challenged, no-one wants to have their minds blown. There is an insatiable appetite for affirmation."

"Affectionate violence. For when a hug just won't do."

"She would disappear folded like origami into her own dreams."

"Fresh starts don't come with expired relationships attached."

"This is the Detroit I want to write about," he says, feeling urbane as fuck. "Tattoo seances and nutty street art and text-message millionaires. People don't even know this is happening. Of course we know it's happening, shithead," Anorexic Thor says. "You don't know it's happening."

"Everyone lives three versions of themselves; a public life, a private life and a secret life. Watch any kid and how he acts with his friends at school. Ask his momma what he’s like at home. Try and get her to believe the same kid robbed the corner store. “Not my boy,” she’ll say and she’s right. Because her boy wouldn’t do that. But we are different things to different people in different contexts."

"She was always bad cop in the family, setting rules and boundaries as if parenting wasn’t the worst game of improve ever."

"An empty house feels a certain way. Ripe with absence."

"Fear festers in the imagination. It’s not fear’s fault. That’s just the way it’s made. Nightmares breed. Allies become enemies. Subversives are everywhere. Paranoia justifies any persecution, and privacy is a luxury when the Reds have the bomb."

"But I really wanted to believe that there were these magic celestial bodies that would direct my life, tell me what to do, and it turns out it's not stars, it's some bits of screwy DNA. I'm just meat with faulty programming."

"Fear festers in the imagination. It’s not fear’s fault. That’s just the way it’s made."

"Fear makes you ugly."

"No one said it would be pretty, yanking despair out of a woman."

"Time heals all wounds. Wounds clot, eventually. The seams knit together."

"Sometime I think I'd like to torture him to death. Other times, I think I'd forgive him. Because that would be worse."

"Do not settle. Never fucking settle."

"The future is not as loud as war, but it is relentless with a terrible fury all its own."

"And the bitch about the new world order: it requires money, same as the old one. She feels betrayed by all the apocalypses of pop culture that promised abandoned cities ripe for the looting."

"The axles of corruption are greased with donut glaze."

"The world is condensing, attention spans narrowing to tiny screens, and there are people who are wittier and smarter, who know how to write for those nanospaces."

"and then no one was flying anywhere. You can’t imagine how much the world can change in six months."

"Hell isn't other people, it's other parents."

"She laughs, and that's really all he wanted."

"You think fear eats up your capacity for wonder, but the awe cuts through her dulled and dimmed mind. Almost a religious experience."

"I like it and it is a great way to pass the time. Initially, I just thought I could write; now I know I can. . Interview question- Why do you write?"

"Experimental writing inspires me. I get my ideas from reading, traveling, and talking."

"Personally? To be recognized. On a larger scale: less dumbing down in readers."

"I went to a writing workshop with Lionel Abrahams."

"I have two books – one a sort of travel book, experimental, with pictures by an artist, another a novel based on the life of Rimbaud. Both are in waiting for a publisher but these are hard to find these days."

"To have lost even the why or the what for - to dream and to wake with the weight of even the mechanical why even the mechanical wherefore -"

"As coming upon a puff-adder coiled on the carpet under the desk"

"For each book that does get published, dozens of manuscripts are rejected. So how do I present myself as a marketable prospect to agents and publishers, somebody worth taking a risk on, perhaps even somebody worth putting some of their marketing budget behind? This is where I have to make some tough choices, not just about the right pose and outfit (black poloneck? white cotton blouse? hair up? hair down?) for the artful black and white portrait I plan to send along with the manuscript (so that publishers can visualise me on the jacket of the first edition), but also about how I position myself."

"A writer who takes the injunctions of branding to heart must have a clear idea of both the profile of the target market and how he or she wishes to position the manuscript - that is, the product - he or she is offering to them."

"If the rules of branding really do apply to bookselling - and the evidence suggests that they do - there is an added complication. If a brand is a set of expectations, those expectations can be a terrible burden"

"To insult someone to their face is to invite the possibility of words turning to fists and bullets."

"Racists often don’t realise that their actions are racist,"

"During her time at university, she took part in student demonstrations protesting the "Greyshirts and the bulldozing of Sophiatown." She earned an undergraduate degree and then finished an Honours degree in History before spending a year at the Teachers' Training College in Johannesburg. She was almost expelled from the Teachers' Training College because of her activism, but she graduated and spent three years teaching at "all White schools."

"She was very secretive about the system, using a secret code with her contacts and a system that was difficult to crack. Altman was also able to successfully deflect attempts by South African spy Craig Williamson, to infiltrate IDAF."

"In order to prevent the Special Branch from confiscating all copies of SACTU materials, she would periodically send them out of the country to be kept on record elsewhere. Much of the material used in writing this book has been gathered from these sources safely kept outside the borders of Apartheid."

"Though her origins were not working class, Phyllis joined the struggle of African workers and always felt privileged that as a White woman she was accepted into SACTU so completely. Like Ray Alexander, this was because Phyllis always elevated the emancipation of Black workers in South Africa above all else."

"A novelist herself, she always appreciated the cultural aspect of the struggle for liberation and injected her enthusiasm into SACTU activities, whether by organising a '£1-a-Day play' for one of the conferences or merely encouraging African workers to sing freedom songs at social gatherings. Phyllis and other comrades working out of Head Office did a commendable job in coordinating the various strands of SACTU work in Johannesburg until she too was banned from trade union activity in September 1963. Though she continued to assist the organisation, it became virtually impossible and Phyllis Altman left South Africa in 1964 believing she could contribute more from abroad."

"In August 1996, while I was a Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town, I was struck by a series of news stories in South African newspapers in which the visual and verbal imagery seemed to me highly distinctive. I kept a collection of clippings and eventually these became the basis for my PhD on images of Islam. In the course of my studies, I conducted archival research into colonial-era paintings, newspapers and popular cultures in South Africa, and read these in juxtaposition with contemporary literary representations of Islam. This trajectory of images across two centuries became the material for a theory about representations of slavery and Islam in South Africa."

"I enjoy the reading and thinking as well as the discussion and exchange that an academic life involves. I love the smell of old books and newspapers in libraries and archives, and the possibility of original ideas that emerge from long hours in a quiet place."

"I love the creativity that emerges from a university community. Working at Penn State with my colleagues and students feels like being exposed to a constant series of illuminating ideas and opportunities for creative collaborations."

"I love reading and visiting museums and galleries, which is also part of my work. Talking with friends over a home-cooked meal is my favorite way to spend an evening."

"I hope we will have developed partnerships and cooperative relations with scholars in other parts of the world, especially in the Global South. For me, such pooling of intellectual and material resources will generate new and necessary ways of engaging with the world's challenges."

"They say God laughs when we make plans: He's watched me trace my path away from war-scarred foreign lands, Where AIDS cases and unmarked graves are common as grains of desert sand, Where solemn bargains for slaves are made each day by neighbouring clans; Where I grew up. Soon as I left the womb, I was running; There was always something to escape, be it Ebola Or just that drunkard driving that Range Rover, Racing over potholes, ten shots from being sober... That was me; ever escaping, Hoping, praying and close-shaving, Evading nature's worst and Mankind at its most perverse; No helping hand to rescue me, I was the perfect refugee - See, Ive been arrested, beaten, Seized by police for no reason, Always fleeing by my teeth's skin, Till leaving, Coming to Heathrow, And finding work, and peace, and love With running no longer in my blood."

"I can write at any time of the day or night. If someone knocks on the door, I can stop typing in the middle of a sentence. I can then sit and chat and when the gas is gone, just resume waar I quit. I don't have to wait for the inspiration or the mood."

"Writing can't be done for leisure, but for me it's a joy of life and I love writing every day."

"I am a Christian and deeply religious, and life is a lot of joy and beautiful things for me. I accept each day as he comes, and try to make the best of it. You don't know in advance what will come your way every day. I trust only in the Lord, because He is always with me and not my strength."

"There's always such a buzz coming over me when I'm on a farm. A farm you have to live. But you can look at the city, you don't have to live it."

"I'm just always writing, I think it's in my system. The time when I was busiest as a principal's wife with three children in the house, I wrote the most. I've wondered a lot how one quits. At a job you retire, but with writing?"

"My favourite genre remains the short story, although it is the most difficult because one has to be able to say so much with so few words. Writing books is much more difficult than for the radio, but with the radio story you work at a pace again and you simply have to write every day."

"I write recreational reading material because I feel relaxed when I write. I never think about a specific target group or a 'someone', but just write for people."

"My childhood was full of happiness and fun," Dricky told Naln. "Playing pop, kennetji, horseback riding, and so on were daily entertainments. And in the evening in the shiny, white moonlight, we frolicked on the sand dunes. When the summer days were oppressively hot, I often walked through the green vineyards to the river. Under the shady trees as I gazed across the gently flowing waters to the sand dunes on the other side, which held a wonderful charm for those who knew and loved them, my first imaginary reverie began. In my imagination, I imagined many a Bible story so vividly that I was unaware of my surroundings. Later, I started writing stories, but I was very modest about it and carefully kept them deep away."

"Sometimes I just hear something on the radio, in a conversation, and then it captures my imagination. It then becomes a starting point for a new story. For example, a friend told me one day that she dreamed of ripe fruit. This is how Ripe Fruit became the title of one of my books. When a framed photo of my son fell off the wall one day, the frame broke while the glass remained intact. This gave rise to the short story Glass in the Frame."

"While teaching again, Brown soon realised that the same racism that she had fought in her home country was also prevalent in the UK. This was the awakening of a new goal – to fight the racism, sexism, and classism that was deeply entrenched in the British education system and wider society."

"So many of us have loved her dearly, been inspired by her virtues, benefited from her friendship, kindness and generosity, and regarded her as a trailblazer in so many things – her stand against apartheid, racism and injustice of all kinds; her service to education and gender rights; her compassion for humanity. She is in our hearts and thoughts and will be remembered as a fine human being as a very dear friend."

"Babette Brown came to the UK after she was forced into political exile due to her opposition to Apartheid. The author of several books on early learning and child development, at the age of 70, she went on to found Persona Dolls, making dolls of many different ethnicities and types, who would tell their stories through a teacher. Children were then encouraged to offer advice and solutions to the experiences a doll describes. This practical and non-threatening approach to dealing with difficult issues has proved especially effective with children. Her charity, established in the 2000s, produce the dolls in South Africa. Thousands of teachers globally are now trained to use the Persona Dolls approach."

"Although she didn’t win we were very satisfied, simply with the nomination, and we happily relaxed with another glass of wine content that Babette would have been so proud that her anti-racist work with young children, through Persona Doll Training, was being acknowledged.""

""Just as the nominations for all the categories were finished to our utter astonishment Babette’s face filled the screen again and it was announced that she had WON a special CHAIRMAN’S AWARD for her work with Persona Doll Training. Shocked, my brother, Peter Brown and I approached the stage to collect her award."

"There is a lot of pressure (in society) to be more than what you are and, in the process, we are not having conversations that matter"

"My grandmother was able to raise 11 kids, providing for them while also holding down different jobs (as a domestic worker and in a shop)"

"I think subconsciously seeing my grandmother work so tirelessly and being a happy woman influenced me to think that I can do a bunch of things and demand more out of life for myself"

"The conversations are set under the covering theme of Love, Loss and Life, because these are broad topics. Guests get to share their experiences with loss, life and what they have learnt"

"I hope each question I ask my guests, viewers can ask themselves so they can stop and think and consider their own journeys"

"I talk to the person (guest) behind the art. Not about what you do, but who you are. And I think some of these women have been longing for a space where people can be interested in who they are outside of the drama of fame"

"It was more about the different cultures rather than about colour but we have managed to work through that and we are still learning"

""As a child, performance and reading were my preferred modes of imaginative play. ...I staged lots of plays with my sister and the neighbourhood kids. In my final year of high school, in 1995, I took my first play to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown."

""It was a devised work using South African poetry, projected photographs, dance and narration to chart the country’s transition from Apartheid to democracy."

"I would not dare approach anything on that scale today…the audacity of youth! As an adult, when I write about a political landscape, its usually within the context of intimate relationships."

"Davids' work is disseminated through a variety of forms – journal articles, live performances, published play texts, film documentaries, a novel – to a range of audiences (commercial, academic/educational)."

"AT HER FEET [22 Nov - 8 Dec 2018]", Baxter Theatre. Retrieved 4 April 2025."

"At the end of 2014, she began writing her play What Remains – about slavery at the Cape, "and the haunted city, about ghosts and property developers, about archives and madness, about history, memory and magic, about paintings, protests and the now"[28] – which was staged at the Main Festival at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival in 2017, directed by Jay Pather, and featuring Denise Newman, Faniswa Yisa, Shaun Oelf and Buhle Ngaba."

"Davids, Nadia (3 July 2017). "'It began with a burial site': Nadia Davids on her new work, What Remains, a play about slavery and the haunted city". The Johannesburg Review of Books. Retrieved 4 April 2025."

"“It’s good to know that we can have an effect on people across the street as well as those across the ocean,”"

"“We are seldom used to seeing people outside of our cultures.”"

"FW de Klerk later said: "She was deeply distressed by all the chopping and changing which she interpreted as a calculated attempt by Mandela himself to humiliate us... This latest humiliation became too much for her to swallow. She became very critical of Mandela and did not hesitate to voice her criticism."

"During her husband's presidency, Marike was the leader of the National Party's women's wing.[8] She also founded the Women's Outreach Foundation (WOF), an organisation that focused on the upliftment of rural women."

"In 1990 de Klerk called for women to play a more active role in the political process.[9] In 1993, she was awarded the Woman for Peace Award in Geneva, Switzerland for promoting the well being and development of rural women."

"I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side."

"After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification."

"Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up."

""I started writing poetry when I was a child, my first published poem was when I was 11. I was brought up in a home that loved poetry and literature, especially the English language. But it was only when I was older that I realised that writing is so much more than words playing on a page."

"Writing contains the writer, their concerns, their social context and their history. My own history became a block to my creativity as I started to explore my identity as a black woman adopted by a white family in apartheid South Africa."

"I felt like the colonised and the coloniser were fighting each other inside my brain. Writing continued to be important to me but I was convinced that it was simply a therapeutic process, of no value to anyone else."

"As a mixed-race African and adoptee I feel, paradoxically, oppressed and completely free....My adult life has been largely devoted to healing this rift. The freedom of my paradoxical position, is in fact that I don't have the constraints of a traditional role and I have access to the world."

"We’re not desperately seeking your attention for its own sake: we pursue the stories that our editorial team deems important, and believe are worthy of your time."

"Allowing as many people as possible to read quality journalism from around the world – especially people who live in places where the free press is in peril."

"We’re not beholden to the political whims of a billionaire owner. No-one can tell us what not to say or what not to report."

"Ostensibly structured in the form of interchanging letters between middle-aged Vita living in Mudgee and her former benefactor, an elderly American named Royce, the novel gives way to more conventional storytelling as the narrative progresses, exploring how art, and the individual artist, can reckon with a brutal colonial past."

"The dual narratives converge in fascinating ways. Vita's chapters wrestle more explicitly with the function of art in post-apartheid South Africa and how inherited guilt shapes an approach to the subjects of her documentary films."

"It is in Pompeii, in fact, that the novel's deepest irony is found: the humans preserved after the ancient Mount Vesuvius eruption are afforded greater respect and dignity than the more recent victims of settler colonialism."

"“It was the great unsolved mystery of her field, why the things that make us happiest also make us unhappiest. Like alcohol. And family. And spouses. And children.”"

"Dovey also loosely bases another character on Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, who was also at college when she was, but the narrative skirts around one Frederick Reese. Why exactly he inspires such loathing among his peers is not given much airplay."

""Life After Truth by Ceridwen Dovey review – lifestyles of the remarkably privileged". The Guardian. 12 November 2020. Retrieved 5 April 2025."

"Life cannot be scooped up like a fish."

"With the demise of apartheid, it not only became possible for writers of all races to express themselves freely for the first time, there were also many stories by talented authors waiting to be told."

"The Cape Town-born poet and fiction writer, Finuala Dowling, published her New and Selected Poems, Pretend You Don’t Know Me, with Bloodaxe last year. Her work, already highly acclaimed in South Africa, has proved a rewarding new discovery for British readers."

"Her technique may appear effortless, and suggest the audience-friendly colloquialism of spoken word poetry, but there is crafted precision in her writing. Her monologues avoid the performance poet’s frequent over-reliance on cliches and catchphrases, and there’s always an edge of sharp self-awareness to the humour."

"Something in her life has so far remained sealed. The poems tease the reader about "it" and her almost overwhelming temptation to "tell"."

"There was an increasing divide between people she wished to know and those she didn't. Her clarity could not endure social talk instead of truth; piety instead of "The Soul's Superior instants"."

""Her widely spaced eyes were too keen for the passivity admired in women of her time. It's the sensitive face of a person who (as her brother put it) "saw things directly and just as they were"."

"Her judgments are full of novelistic insight, pushing into the biographical material to substantiate her hunches, tracing patterns and repetitions in these writers’ emotional lives and in their work."

"She tried to cope with the calamities of motherhood – not only repeated pregnancies and childbirth and childcare, but also the sickness and death of her offspring – while she followed her husband around Italy in pursuit of an ideal freedom."

"Her Divided Lives, a moving memoir of her own childhood in South Africa and relationship with her beloved mother – who was intelligent and spiritual, struggling all her life with illness – feels like a source book for the preoccupations underpinning Gordon’s writing on literature."

"'I had been waiting in Harare for five weeks and had been vetted and grilled. In the end I received a call telling me I should be at State House in half an hour. I arrived at 10am and three hours later His Excellency - "HE" as everyone calls him - received me.'"

"I think he granted me the interview because he feels he is getting old and it's time to put certain things on the record. But he expects to win the election and probably will.'"

"'I needed help in understanding how events in Mugabe's life, including his childhood, had impacted on his internal narrative.' By the time Mugabe was 10, his father had left home and his older brother had died. 'Mugabe has a thin skin and shaky self-image. When rejected or humiliated, he turns to revenge. His relationship with the British government has the intensity of a family feud.'"

"The story of [Zuma's] actions on that fateful night last year is a sad reflection on the former deputy president's morals and code of conduct. Zuma is not fit to lead a country where women's rights are high on the agenda, where the fight against Aids is, or should be, an urgent national priority and where the protection of the weak and vulnerable is the duty of the powerful. South Africa deserves a president who can lead by example. Jacob Zuma has shown he cannot do that."

"It is difficult to reach consensus on a definition of racism, but most people agree that it starts with generalizations. It involves projecting the attributes of an individual onto a group as a whole on the basis of race, with pejorative connotations. Heidi Holland's narrative is a classic example of this kind of racist thinking."

"This kind of racism was rife in the early years of our democracy. It relegated whites to "second class citizens", unable to state a fact if any black person might be offended by it. This warped logic has thankfully diminished somewhat due to many (black and white) South Africans rejecting it for the nonsense that it is."

"I wasn't five years old yet and she drowned in the Vaal River at the age of eight, on the same day that King Edward VII died, because I still remember well how all the flags were hanging half-mast when we went to fetch the little coffin in town the following day with the hooded cart – the day my late father came to wake us at four o'clock to see Halley's Comet that was clearly visible in the sky. We all felt so awful, because my late sister's little body was still lying in the house."

"Those days the Strand was little more than a fishing village. Now I had to go to church and to Sunday school. It didn't take me long to learn the nicest hymns by heart. For me these songs contained the structure, rhythm, and mystery of poetry. Inspired by this and by my grandmother's loving care, I started writing verses. My first 'poetry' appeared in the school magazine."

"I was six then. Ouma recited them to the Coloured community that lived on the outskirts of the Strand, where she used to go and teach them Bible lessons after Sunday school. I still remember how hard it was for me to walk down that long dirt road, holding Ouma's hand, her jokes along the way and the glimmer in her deep green eyes when she looked down at me. She could not have been more than five feet tall herself."

"I would stand to one side of her pulpit in front of the Coloured community, and Ouma and I and the entire congregation would end up in tears as hymn after heart-stirring hymn was sung."

"I’m a romantic. Perhaps at a push, we could fit this novel in among the Romantics. But I think it’s better placed as Gothic though I’m not Gothic."

"I’m particularly interested in Balthazar and his study of the stars and planets, and the courageous way in which he challenges the status quo of the known universe."

"Yes, I wrote these verses to complement each of the Parts One, Two and Three. Each verse places a solitary figure on a landscape and so sets a contemplation in place. But the epic poem, the one that appears in Part Two and then accompanies the novel to its end, I only started writing about half-way through the novel and completed it at the end. The epic poem took my final attention and care. It had to appear as an ancient text, with some parts lost."

"Sarah Clayton made a podcast with my husband, Don Pinnock, who is an expert on youth at risk. She was looking at the connection between the roots of criminality in childhoods where a love and respect of animals is not nurtured. Don introduced me to Sarah, and we agreed to work together to teach children, through stories and poems, to love animals, nature and the wilderness."

"No, this is not my first book for children. But the “ethos” in all those I have written is consistent. They all evoke compassion and care and are rich in love of the environment."

"The book has been very well received. Our first distribution was through direct sales and donations to children and projects that might not have afforded the book. We are now preparing to reprint, and the book will go into retail bookshops. We are also working on an Afrikaans edition."

"I wanted to give a sense of: “Come with me and let’s look at some wonderful, natural things, and let’s have fun, but let’s also learn together to cherish each other and all living things.” So, the first “voice” belongs to Phoebe as she invites the young reader to travel with her, and the book concludes with her basically empowering the child to take care of the earth."

"Definitely the Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square. I was determined to fill that empty plinth! It took five years of campaigning with my committee at the Royal Society of Arts, but we did it."

"My restaurant in the Seventies and Eighties was the place to be. I’ve cooked for most of the Royals, Elton John, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Alec Guinness… the list goes on. They all loved my food – at least, I hope they did!"

"while cooking for 300 at Vintners Hall, I mistakenly thawed beetroot puree instead of raspberry for the vanilla ice cream. I added sugar and lemon juice, used it anyway, and guess what? Nobody noticed!"

"Every school child should learn 10 basics: Shepherd’s Pie, Spag Bol, Pizza, Curry, Salad Nicoise, Omelette, Quiche, Ratatouille, Trifle, and Apple Pie. These recipes will make you a hit at uni and set you up for life!"

"Our first job was to deal with the concrete. The previous tenant farmer couldn’t make money out of his farm"

"If you’ve had a quarrel, a walk in the garden calms things down"

"I think university catches you at a very specific time in your life where you, yourself, are trying to figure out yourself."

"There will be points where the work will not be magnificent and there will be moments when it comes back to itself again."

"You don’t have to create something new. Just be in a conversation and then something new will arise."

"The greatest thing about writing fiction is you don't know where the story is going. When I was writing Hlomu I became her - you internalise the character and you let her lead you"

"February has always been a dull month for me, a dreadful period where I’m tired and irritable. My sister says it’s my mind rebooting itself. I say I don’t know and I don’t care because, ironically, it is also the period where I’m most creative."

"at no point in my life did I sit down in a garden and inhale fresh air, watch flowers blooming under the blue sky and become inspired to write about broken men and the women who try to fix them"

"I don’t have a sacred writing space, but I do write better after midnight, when I’m surrounded by creative energy"

"The stories I write come from being a black woman in South Africa, the friendships and relationships I have had, families and what we perceive as love"

"It is them — because they are still buying my books and hyping them even five years later — who motivate me to continue writing"

"So many things have come out of my writing journey and the risk I took to publish myself. The best one is the growing fearlessness about telling our stories as they are and using familiar language to tell them."

"I don't think anything inspires creativity for me. I just wanted to write a story about black people."

"I'd rather someone talk to me about the characters in my books than my style of writing. I wanted it to appeal to someone on a social grant, to someone in an executive office."

"The fact that you have a gift that is different from a lot of people… that you can create things and the understanding of the value of that and what it can do for you. You need to understand what intellectual property is. Artists and creators, rarely ever consult an intellectual property attorney or ask questions or some of them don’t even know that those exist. So, you need to have that information. The research and the knowledge and protecting what you have created, there are ways to protect what you do"

"It’s very difficult to adapt a book into a film, especially a fictional book where I have the freedom to do whatever I want to do with the characters."

"It is our responsibility as storytellers to promote a reading culture to communities, many of which are marginalised."

"Reading opens one’s mind to different things and different worlds and expands horizons"

"In order to create a culture of reading among children, we need to make books accessible to them and write stories they can relate to"

"The truth is I would have been fine i it had flopped, because at that time I wasn't as invested as I am now in the business."

"Sometimes I don't even like or agree with her, but I can't change her or tame her just because I'm not happy with her decisions."

"I’m the most known person who isn’t a celebrity"

"If the assumption that I’m influential is true, then that’s the one issue I’m willing to speak about, openly and honestly."

"I have rejected many ‘influencer’ deals, turned down many celebrity event invitations (not because there’s anything wrong with them, but because I know my limits and complications"

"There are things that you can’t translate into English, if you tried the sentence would be completely flat"

"It takes guts, patience and a lot of hard work. I think anyone who is passionate about writing and wants to own and be in control of their creativity can do it. I used my own money to publish, which was risky because I wasn’t sure how well my book was going to do. It took a while before the money I made from book sales was actual profit. But I’m at a great place now"

"I believe in anti-racism so much because I believe it's at the core of us solving so many other social issues 12 May, 2025"

"The minute we lose the ability to see the humanity in the next person that looks different from you—that's when racism is planted into the fibre of society, and that's when we desensitize ourselves to the importance of existing in a just and equitable world with people that look different from us"

"As much as the apartheid regime has no longer been constitutionalised, racism hasn't disappeared"

"I first-hand got to see racism from my identity not being welcomed or understood"

"The generation of Nelson Mandela brought political emancipation. But political emancipation doesn't exist without economic and mental emancipation"

"Laws can change, but people still have to change"

"I've realised that a big part of fighting racism deals with the mind — and the only way to unlock and liberate the mind is through access to knowledge"

"the oppressed — Black people, people of colour — need to get to a point where they take themselves out of their own mental prison and liberate their minds"

"I believe that books play a big role, especially books by Africans, in seeing representation, seeing yourself being written up in a positive light, seeing your existence reflected in the pages of literature"

"One of the things that the apartheid regime was very successful at was making all schools in rural areas and townships environments in which it's difficult to come out and be a leader in society"

"I believe that if we can work on empowering those schools, we'll definitely be doing a huge job in society"

"Poverty is a manmade crisis"

"The economy in South Africa is still divided, and wealth and poverty have opposite faces"

"The fight against racism is a fight for the betterment of all of humanity, because it determines how we will live amongst each other, and how resources will be shared"

"Young people make up a majority of the global population, but they are still not included in building a world that they are going to inherit"

"I still lived in a world where every last bit of your life was determined by your race: what kind of opportunities you're going to be exposed to, the kind of school you'll go to, the environment you’ll live in. My entire world still was determined on the basis of race."

"One of the things that made me unable to escape activism was that growing up, I experienced a huge amount of anti-Blackness, which I became very aware of just being in a family with both my parents of colour"

"I realised that you have one of two choices: either you try to speak up and see what the effects of speaking up will be, or you die in silence over the silent war you constantly find yourself in"

"I chose to speak up because I felt it was an injustice of its own for me to see the reality of the institution and still choose to be silent."

"I chose to be an activist because I don't want a generation of young South Africans to still be having the same kind of conversations about systemic and institutional racism 30 years from now"

"I was 13, 14 years old, a child basically, [and] I was receiving death threats from old white adults"

"we spoke up about something we were always taught to be silent about"

"I work in these spaces where you're constantly speaking up and you’re always pouring into other people's cups and your cup is hardly poured into"

"Black children see the diversity of the world around them and understand that just because someone doesn't look like them, that doesn't make them inferior"

"The most urgent thing that needs to happen to ensure that education is used as a tool to change the world is firstly, it needs to be accessible"

"We need to ensure that previously poorly funded schools aren't continuing to be disadvantaged now"

"So, in my journey of finding my voice to speak up against racism I began to decolonise my mind, unlocking the shackles, and unlearning the belief of looking at Eurocentric beauty as the standard for beauty"

"I then began to see my hair as not just hair but a central core element of identity"

"asking me to change my hair is like asking me to erase my blackness and you cannot separate the two"

"I hope that when children pick up my book it empowers them to feel proud of their existence and their identity and it ultimately empowers their existence and enables them to proudly be themselves"

"Your greatest power lies in proudly being yourself and that awakens a new level of consciousness"

"Societal beauty standards largely impact children’s self-esteem especially in a world where children are exposed to social media without any boundaries or limitations"

"Representation plays a huge role in prompting acceptance and inclusivity, as well as decolonising what is already represented out there, Whether It Be In Books, media outlets, or television"

"As long as we have not won the war on racism in this country, we have not won the war on hair policies"

"The hair policy is a symptom of a greater diagnosis of institutionalised racism and systemic racism"

"Too many young people are over-mentored and underfunded"

"I believe young people are not as engaged in various aspects of activism, primarily because of being excluded"

"I hope that my activism leaves a trail of impact by Empowering more people to feel empowered to see the power in their voices and use their voices to effect change around them"

"There was a pencil test [during the apartheid in South Africa],” she said. “If a pencil was put into your hair and when you shook your head, it did not slide out, you would pass for coloured, if it stayed inside you would be considered Black"

"I was being forced to assimilate to whiteness and being forced to assimilate to an image that I did not fit into"

"You can't separate any expression of Black hair from Black identity, especially because for Black people it's more than just hair"

"I’ve always kept that close to my heart, understanding that everything I do is not just for me but for those who came before me who walked so I could fly, who did not have the means to do what I do but ensured that I would"

"You don’t need to justify your place, you are valid and so is your place here"

"You are capable of being great regardless of anything anyone says."

"I would like to see a South Africa where young people and the tools to empower them — such as education, literacy and employment — are prioritised"

"The most important message is that bravery doesn't have a size or age"

"You don't have to be a famous person person to bring about change in the world or in a community"

"Before 2016, i was already someone shaped by my experiences and beliefs, preparing me for the moment I finally stood up for myself"

"Bravery can co-exist with fear"

"Fear, anxiety, self doubt is normal. But at the end of the day, bravery is doing it regardless."

"Asking me to change my hair is like asking me to erase my blackness"

"I believe no young person should abandon their childhood to fight struggles that should have been fought decades ago"

"My activism has thrust me into the public domain from a tender young age, and ultimately I spent all my teenage years growing up directly in the public eye, which at times became difficult as I had to grow up much quicker than my years in order to navigate public commentary and critique"

"the 1956 march continues to remain a “source of inspiration for me on the power that women’s voices hold and a source of inspiration to continue advocating for justice and human rights."

"A huge part of my activism has been to empower people to use their own voices to change the world and their circumstances"

"The world is changed by ordinary people that have the audacity to use their voices for change"

"I strongly believe that seeing yourself represented in the pages of books empowers one’s existence"

"I wanted to ensure that no other Black child that comes after me should ever experience this severe form of intimidation"

"Even in communities of colour, there is a lot of anti-blackness"

"Gender-based violence isn't only physical, there's TGBV (Technology-Facilitated Gender Based Violence) and a lot of it starts on social media."

"When you wear your Afro out, you are already starting your politics"

"Small acts begin in your home"

"[My conviction] is inspired by a deep desire for change and justice, and the fact that as young South African people we are defined as ‘Born-Free’, but have never had a chance to interrogate freedom and ask questions about our democracy"

"We’re not seeing enough young people at the decision-making table"

"When we demand change for the future that we’re going to inherit, we’re told we’re overly radical or that people at the [decision-making] table speak for us"

"Activism is playing such a big role in shaping the future. It’s giving young people and marginalised communities a voice to define their future,"

"South Africa is a perfect example of how destructive reform is as opposed to abolition"

"Young people also belong where policies are being drafted, where policies are being made"

"Stay genuine to your cause, constantly ensure that you listen"

"So I believe that there is power in choosing to select your thoughts in the same manner that you select clothing in the morning"

"take a seat, look at how far you've come, congratulate yourself and work on bettering yourself in whatever skills you have because we will never get a time like this ever again"

"I do not like being labelled as a born-free because I've always questioned whether the freedom is a reality"

"My activism located me at a time when I couldn’t reject it due to the conditions"

"I want a young black girl child to understand her capabilities are not limited by her physical appearance but are enhanced when she is confident and owning who she is"

"I think i just love danger"

"If you re not surprised, how do you expect the reader to be surprised?"

"We can have the policies and constitution in the world, but if we're not working on these issues at home and school, then we're never going to get it right."

"Don't allow anyone or anything to make yo feel like you cannot fulfill whatever it is that your heart says you're here to fulfill."

"Living in South Africa, crime is something that is always with us, in our conscious and subconscious minds"

"Flashiness is off-putting, but it is something that we live with amongst the black middle class – with people who made a lot of money very quickly. I understand the temptation to say, I started at the bottom, now I’m here, and I want everyone to see. But at the same time, it just puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on people. That’s why, right now, mental health issues are such a big thing in society – it’s not the only reason, but it is one of them"

"There is always that question: is this who we are as a society? How do we question our value system and what that means for the society we are raising"

"It was tricky trying to find the balance between the producers’ instincts on what works on screen versus the creator’s instincts for what their character would or would not do in a certain situation"

"As much as my writing is diverse and sometimes straddles different categories, it’s clear that placing any of my books under a section marked “chick lit” is patently sexist"

"If all African writers only wrote about race (for instance), which is a major factor that contributes to the inequalities faced by black people across the world, we would miss the opportunity to bring out the other human aspects of our people"

"In a country that has as many inequalities as ours, volunteering should be second nature"

"The fear from an author normally stems from having to let go of something that you have birthed and nurtured."

"I just think women are so much more than that, we have so much more to offer than our beauty and body."

"Writing is a very cathartic experience and I use it to address my fears"

"Leadership involves responsibility. I want to be an ambassador with deep purpose and a voice that reflects this country. I intend to take EYA very seriously during the coming year of my reign and ensure that everything I and my fellow finalists do, is anchored in impact and can be measured when I hand over"

"I’ve carried so many of you guys with me and for me it really is a testament of intentional leadership and how if you really wanna see change within the systems that you step in, you need to just start somewhere"

"My heart is so incredibly full. If I’m being completely honest it feels like I’ve won the World Cup. That’s the best way I can explain it"

"It feels like I’ve won the World Cup, but I walk - I was gonna say I walk out of this, but really I walk into this as a completely different woman. But I still carry my old self into it"

"I want you guys to see the kind of courage that it takes, the kind of thought and the mindset it takes and how sometimes you really just have to be willing to bet on yourself to be able to take it like one step further"

"It’s still sinking in. I am surrounded by community and so incredibly honoured. I plan to continue the work I have already started"

"But now with the support and guidance from Miss South Africa and Empower Youth Africa, we are able to do it on a bigger scale with more resources. I am so incredibly humbled"

"Standing on that stage, I felt such gratitude. Not just for the crown, but for the journey that led me to that moment. It was such a moment of validation for the little girl in me who doubted if she belonged in certain rooms, let alone on that stage"

"My name really reminds me that being a leader is not about status, but really about service. Living up to that name now means remaining rooted in my purpose even in moments of discomfort. It motivates me to be the voice that creates space for others to grow and feel empowered in the spaces they step into"

"Our journey has been so deeply intertwined. Watching my sister on the Miss SA 2023 stage really showed me how attainable our big dreams are. She taught me how to remain graceful under pressure and to really stay true to myself regardless of where I am"

"I saw how much she transformed during her journey through Miss SA and what an incredible platform it is for self-development"

"To me inclusive education means that a child’s financial, linguistic, cultural and socioeconomic background does not hinder them from receiving fair access to resources. True inclusion is acknowledging potential and providing resources for each child to succeed"

"Speech therapy taught me the importance of language in education. When a child is not able to understand the language they are being taught in, we cannot begin to address later unemployment"

"Growing up in the Eastern Cape really grounded me. It taught me to remain humble and the importance of community. In Idutywa, I learnt how success is a collective effort. From drawing water to preparing meals for big family celebrations, if you want to accomplish something it starts with community"

"I am really focusing on playing my part in breaking the cycle of unemployment from its root cause through addressing our illiteracy crisis. I plan on collaborating with multilingual authors, translators and illustrators to produce books and resources that are tailored to all South African languages. And to create literacy workshops for parents and teachers in underserved communities, because transformation really begins at the roots"

"I initially wrote the book for one specific child, but after seeing how it impacted her understanding of colours and counting, I wanted to make it more accessible to children. I started by self-publishing and distributing the one in isiXhosa, which I now plan to translate into all 11 official languages"

"I have come to realise through my speech therapy sessions that language builds trust. It really has been an easy way to say, ‘I see you.’ Being multilingual helps me gain insights into the lives and experiences of different communities. It may not give me an in-depth image, but it allows me to meaningfully connect"

"Most importantly, I would love to focus on how to support struggling learners and how to identify learners with delays in language or with special needs"

"Hope is contagious. I want to show our youth that your background does not limit your future. When you start doing the work with what you have, you become able to achieve goals you previously thought were impossible"

"I view the prize package as a seed for my future, not an immediate reward — although I will likely buy myself something fun as well. During my reign I want to create a foundation for my literacy work that will carry on past my reign as Miss South Africa."