Human Rights Activists

"She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless—for a moment, before he began holding forth again. (p3)"

"… It's hard to say whether it was pain or the past that was being extirpated or whether they were the same thing. The doctors who treated her were unlikely to have experienced such profound instability: disappearing mothers, the vast gap between the medieval Russian-Polish Pale and glittering amnesiac Los Angeles, the three or four languages she left behind and the English she never completely acquired, the annihilation of the world she came from and of the relatives she left behind. Post-traumatic stress disorder is an alternate diagnosis a therapist once proffered for her behavior, a condition that recognized all the kinds of war she survived and a world in which nothing was too far-fetched or terrible to be possible."

"… We talked while the full moon mounted in the sky, words filling up the narrow space between us, as much a buffer as a link. Hours passed and then suddenly at my foot there was a wriggle of the soil. A kangaroo mouse emerged, a creature that I have never otherwise seen except fleeing at a distance. I put my hand on the man's shoulder to call his attention to this surprise, and we fell silent and watched the strangely fearless mouse do its work for a long time, then resumed the conversation more slowly and more softly as the creature continued to refine its tunnel entrance and the mound of gravelly earth at its mouth, indifferent to our presence. Bats swooped down and snatched invisible meals from the air, and coyotes began to howl, more of them, closer and more persistently than I've ever heard before or since, a whole orchestra of drawn-out cries into the dawn."

"When I think of the artist Yves Klein, I think of those absolutists who preceded him by a generation or two, those who vanished, think of the boxer and Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan who in 1918 was supposed to leave Mexico to meet his new wife in Argentina but was never seen again; of Everett Ruess, the bohemian who might have become an artist or writer had he not disappeared into the canyons of Utah at the age of twenty in 1934, leaving behind a final signature carved into the rock: "Nemo" or "no one"; of the aviator Amelia Earhart who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937; of the pilot Antoine de Saint Exupéry who left behind several lapidary books before his plane too disappeared, in 1944, in the Mediterranean. They were all saddled with a desire to appear in the world and a desire to go as far as possible that was a will to disappear from it. In the ambition was a desire to make over the world as it should be; but in the disappearances was the desire to live as though it had been made over, to refashion oneself into a hero who disappeared not only into the sky, the sea, the wilderness, but into a conception of self, into legend, into the heights of possibility."

"This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue."

"The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so."

"The assumption that whatever we now believe is just common sense, or what we always knew, is a way to save face. It's also a way to forget the power of a story and of a storyteller, the power in the margins, and the potential for change."

"What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable."

"You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center."

"Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society."

"The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden—which is to say that revolution doesn't necessarily look like revolution."

"You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future."

"We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep."

"Most of us would say, if asked, that we live in a capitalist society, but vast amounts of how we live our everyday lives - our interactions with and commitments to family lives, friendships, avocations, membership in social, spiritual and political organizations-are in essence noncapitalist or even anticapitalist, full of things we do for free, out of love, and on principle."

"Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away."

"when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection. ("False Hope and Easy Despair" in 2016 edition)"

"...as Freire points out, struggle generates hope as it goes along. Waiting until everything looks feasible is too long to wait. ("When We Lost" in 2016 edition)"

"Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don't depend on them. ("When We Lost" in 2016 edition)"

"I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul. (p137)"

"The revolutionary days I have been outlining are days in which hope is no longer fixed on the future: it becomes an electrifying force in the present. (p108)"

"A better world, yes; a perfect world, never. (p82)"

"A couple of years ago, a friend wrote to urge me to focus on the lyrical end of my writing rather than activism and I wrote back, “What is the purpose of resisting corporate globalization if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the unmanageable, the local, the poetic, and the eccentric? So they need to be practiced, celebrated, and studied too, right now.” I could have added that they themselves become forms of resistance; the two are not necessarily separate practices. (p68)"

"Writing is lonely, it’s an intimate talk with the dead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers, with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later. An essay, a book, is one statement in a long conversation you could call culture or history; you are answering something or questioning something that may have fallen silent long ago, and the response to your words may come long after you’re gone and never reach your ears, if anyone hears you in the first place. (p64)"

"I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good (p61)"

"Since the Seattle surprise, it's become standard practice to erect a miniature police state around any globalization summit, and these rights free zones seem to prefigure what corporate globalization promises. (p46)"

"I get it now. I didn't get it then. That life is about losing and about doing it as gracefully as possible...and enjoying everything in between."

"I learned that you can't truly own anything, that true ownership comes only in the moment of giving."

"Rage and grief are savage companions, but despair is the final undoing."

"Having such a large family can be challenging. I won't deny that. But they're just great kids so you just deal with everything. There's very few things in my life that I regret. If I could change anything, maybe I wish I had learnt and done certain things earlier. I would have liked to have continued in school longer. I would have been interested in living in Africa and perhaps trained as a pediatrician."

"You learn by going where you have to go."

"Well, I didn't lose my faith in God and in my own commitment to what I think my religion means to me but I did lose faith in Rome. I was horrified that the Pope at the time of the Rwandan massacre— this is a Catholic country, Rwanda—made no attempt to go there and to halt the killing. And I mean, who among us would not have tried? And on the contrary many of the perpetrators were actually sheltered. So I disengaged with my faith at that point. And then when I went to Darfur some 10 years later, by then I had cast away any allegiance to Rome and I saw -- you know, if only we'd had a Pope like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for example, who was engaged on the issues that concerned the most needy of humanity."

"On this planet there are people who are suffering beyond description. They are innocent people, they didn’t bring this upon themselves. They are the victims of the sins of other people. And while it’s hard to see, it’s important to understand that these people exist. I’m talking to you now because they can’t and I hope to be a voice for them. They need support."

"If you're brought up a Catholic and you've had 13 years of convent education with nuns, there's no way you ever get out from under that. I've accepted that fact about myself so there are certain things—like my lost saint—that sometimes are not so lost."

"He was a man full of hatred … Che Guevara executed dozens and dozens of people who never once stood trial and were never declared guilty … In his own words, he said the following: "At the smallest of doubt we must execute." And that's what he did at the Sierra Maestra and the prison of Las Cabanas."

"I am old enough to remember when there was no Amnesty International. I am also old enough to remember a Cuba before Fidel Castro. Indeed, my seemingly simple life trajectory dramatically changed course right as the two were coming into existence. In 1960, at the age of 23, I was taken away at gunpoint in the night for refusing to place a sign on my desk that read, “I’m with Fidel.” One year later, Amnesty International was founded, and I became one of their first prisoners of conscience."

"Having liberated the key to a liberatory interpretation and contextualization of the Qur'an, the issue of patriarchal and misogynic interpretations of the Qur'an becomes a societal issue rather than an issue of the religion."

"Revolution without evolution is just a waste of lives."

"You cannot denounce violence in the present and encourage it in the past by glorifying violent historical figures."

"It is an irony to see in some Muslim societies someone who curses God, in his daily slang when angry, go out and protest against the Danish cartoons about the Prophet."

"We can imagine the Palestinian identity as a person born in a village prior to the introduction of modern administration; a person whose village was divided between other villages, and whose date of birth is unknown. A person that started struggling to prove she exists in the 1960s and suffers today from a weakened structure and an uncertain future."

"I hope that I will be the last victim in China's long record of treating words as crimes. Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth."

"We must note that speaking truth to power has rewards as well as costs. People who dare to speak out about major public events may not receive tangible benefits, but they receive the very considerable rewards of high moral reputation among fellow Chinese as well as in the international community."

"My view as a Chinese is that Obama's elevation to the position of 44th president of the United States underscores the greatness of the American system."

""Elegy to Lin Zhao, Lone Voice of Chinese Freedom" (2004)"

"Power and money reign supreme in our nation today. Universities count for nothing, and scholarship and ideas count for even less. Love, truth, and sacrifice are meaningless concepts, while betrayal and collective amnesia are taken as a matter of course."

"Admittedly, righteousness is weak unless it is backed by power, but power devoid of righteousness is evil. If most people cast their lot with the latter, then evil will prey forever upon humankind, as wolves and tigers prey upon lambs."

"In the conflict between survival of the flesh and dignity of the spirit, if we cower to preserve ourselves, we become mere zombies, despite our trappings of prosperity. If we stand up for our dignity, we live nobly, no matter how much we may risk or suffer."

"In a totalitarian state, the purpose of politics is power and power alone. The "nation" and its peoples are mentioned only to give an air of legitimacy to the application of power. The people accept this devalued existence, asking only to live from day to day."

"In its actual power today, the Chinese regime is still far behind the U.S., and there is no chance of its becoming a world hegemon any time soon."

""Ultra-nationalism" stands naked as nothing but a euphemism for the worship of violence in service of autocratic goals - be they the terrorism and holy war of Islamic fundamentalists or the refusal of dictatorial systems to accept political democracy."