Socialist Feminists

"realities of our own countries rather than catching up with the western economic models, [Bhatt urged] the people to follow a principle which ensures six basic necessities- food, shelter, clothing, primary education, primary healthcare and primary banking- are available within a 100 mile distance. If these necessities are locally produced and consumed, we will have the growth of a new holistic economy."

"Teachers do not care…It is not because teachers are badly paid and the teachers are organized but they do not teach. If we don’t respect them it is because we see them doing other business than teaching."

"...as I worked with the unionized labor, of the much larger labor force that was outside the purview of the protective labor laws, of any form of social security, access to justice, access to financial services, anything. That tugged at my heart. And those people were unorganized and had no strength to act to seek remedies."

"…Inner peace is important, but I have always felt that living a daily life with peace is the end. So in reality individual peace and global peace are not separate. They are one and the same."

"...tribute to her unflinching zeal towards the betterment of women in society."

"Women predominate in the lower strata of employment."

"What we really are looking for is self reliance and that is how we should measure success. I don’t much like the word empowerment, but self-reliance is the foundation of SEWA’s approach,."

"Every human being has something, a spiritual element, that makes them want to do better, to reach higher."

"Microfinance is the best example of success in the kinds of systemic institutional areas."

"All my life I have worked to change concepts, and that begins with how people see and understand the problems."

"SEWA is about political action, and that has always been at the heart of what we have done. It is about changing the balance of power in favor of the poor. That has meant constant tension, with big farmers, moneylenders, contractors, big traders, government, local panchayats, and so on."

"Injustice happens at many levels, from the grass roots to the top. And one of the keys of SEWA’s vision and action is linking them."

"She (Bhatt) has helped not only women in India but women in South Africa, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and inspired so many others to find their own way forward to overcome long legacies of inequality and unfairness. She has helped us imagine and then work toward a fairer world."

"Systems are needed, for example for management, accounting, skill development and MIS to serve the needs of the working poor."

"SEWA is now the largest union in India, with a membership of around 1.2 million women."

"[SEWA] have been doing many different things, leading the SEWA movement which is about economic freedom for the poor, women, and self employed."

"[So], in 1972, we started SEWA, the Self Employed Women’s Association. SEWA in many respects is a microcosm of the general picture of the informal sector, in India and worldwide."

"I am Hindu, and my activism is very much framed within that context, of karma as meaning action."

"The country is moving in a different direction, times have changed. But for me Gandhiji’s values are still the frame, still alive and valid."

"So for her contribution to India and particularly the women of India, and to the global community, it is my honour to present the first Global Fairness Award to my friend, Ela Bhatt""

"Ela Bhatt has upended the old ways of thinking and compelled all of us to raise our collective ambitions about what we can do to."

"Even in places where it is most stark, people still should be able to develop their ambitions and direct them toward building better lives. And Ela and SEWA have proven that,"

"The work that she has done through the Self-Employed Women's Association is not only about finding solutions to the problems of poverty. At its most basic level, Ela's work is about fairness, about giving every person the chance to achieve his or her dreams, to make the most of his or her God-given potential'no matter how rich or poor, no matter whether they work in a factory or a home or on the side of a road."

"Unlimited enmity of the Albanian people against Serbia is the foremost real result of the Albanian policies of the Serbian government. The second and more dangerous result is the strengthening of two big powers in Albania, which have the greatest interests in the Balkans."

"We have carried out the attempted premeditated murder of an entire nation. We were caught in that criminal act and have been obstructed. Now we have to suffer the punishment.... In the Balkan Wars, Serbia not only doubled its territory, but also its external enemies."

"Grouping and mutuality of countries and peoples in the Balkans is the only road that leads to economic, national and political liberation."

"It is now necessary to face the truth and to acknowledge against all prejudices that the struggle that the Albanian tribe is leading today is a natural and unavoidable historic struggle for a different political life than that experienced under Turkish rule – different also from that which its neighbours Serbia, Greece and Montenegro would like to force upon the Albanians."

"In one of his many public statements, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Montenegrin Radovan Karadžić, said the Serbs in the past period, when everyone was on their side, had been subjected to "genocidal extermination" whereas now, over the last year, when so many are against them, they are suffering the least. Of all the innumerable absurdities and untruths that have been uttered, this statement truly takes the cake. For more than forty years Bosnia was inhabited by Bosnians, and we did not distinguish between Serbs, Muslim, and Croats, or at least such distinctions were not paramount in their mutual relations. Throughout that period, to the best of the Yugoslav and world public's knowledge, there were no detention camps for Serbs in Bosnia, no brothels for Serbs women, no Serbian children had their throat cut. (...) But according to Karadzic, the Serbs were somehow unhappy then. And now, in war, with so many dead, (...) now, according to their leader, the time has come when they are suffering the least. (...) Ethnically pure states are an impossibility in today's world, and it is ridiculous to try to create and maintain such a state, even when there is just one nation."

"It would be a serious mistake to assume that provincial prejudices are difficult to overcome. Whatever people say about this, one can easily win or lose their goodwill by one's presence and behavior. Some say that time is a great healer: in the provinces, it is boredom which brings about change and its justification. Any kind of change in the routine of a small town appears awful at first; but after a while people recognize that it wasn't so terrible, and that, indeed, a thousand curious but timid souls were just waiting for an example to be set, to launch themselves into a career of innovation. (III)"

"...her soul began to blossom and, within her soul, the drama of her life began to unfold. (III)"

"People who live in a calm retreat have a marvelous instinct for imagining storms and disasters in other people's lives, and they secretly rejoice at having avoided them themselves. It is a consolation that must be allowed these people, since pride, too, has its needs, and virtue alone cannot always compensate for long hours of boredom and solitude. (II)"

"Three years ago in Saint-Front, an ugly little town that you won't find on any map, something happened that caused quite a stir. It wasn't particularly interesting and few people heard of it, but it had serious consequences. (first lines)"

"Laurence did what all predestined artists do: she suffered through all the misery, all the agony of unrecognized, unappreciated talent. (I)"

"Those who inspire in us the greatest affection are not always those for whom we have the highest regard. Tenderness does not require admiration and enthusiasm: it is based on a feeling of equality which makes us seek out in a friend a peer, a man subject to our own passions, our own weaknesses. Veneration demands a different sort of affection than that continuously openhearted intimacy we call friendship. I would have a very poor opinion of a man who could not love what he admired; I would have an even worse opinion of a man who could love only what he admired. This applies merely to friendship. Love is a different creature entirely: it lives only on enthusiasm, and all that injures its feverish delicacy blights and withers it. But the sweetest of all human emotions, the one that is nourished by calamities and mistakes as well as by greatness and heroic acts, the one that spans every stage of life, that begins to develop in us from our very first sensation of being, and that endures as long as we do, the one that parallels and actually lengthens our life, that is reborn from its ashes and that reties itself as tightly and just as firmly after being broken; that emotion, alas! is not love, as you well know, but friendship. (beginning of Chapter 1)"

"His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now over-analyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again "neat," as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with a meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring."

"Here I am, worried and anxious; there she is, serenity incarnate. How can she appear before me like a human reproach? Like an ironic comment on my own life. How can she never suspect I might be miserable? Unlike myself, she is not protected by a mature, philosophical outlook on existence. Compared to me she is a child. No struggle has tested her strength, no disappointment has yet caused her spirit to waver. But that's it, by God! That's the very reason she is the stronger. She has lost nothing of herself. She has not been devoured by vultures and wolves! She is untouched. She lives life to the full. However feeble the flame within her it is enough to light her way. But as for me, the fire in my heart burns me alive."

"Je n'appelle pas priere un choix et un arrangement de paroles lancees vers le ciel, mais un entretien de la pensee avec l'ideal de lumiere et de perfections infinies."

"What is it that you think about, Sleeping Beauty, as you ride along the country lanes on that skinny mare of yours? And not so much of a beauty either, come to think of it. Too skinny, too pale, too dull. Not a glimmer of sparkle in those big dark eyes. Still, I do wonder, when you're riding past the hedges, little dreaming you are watched, I wonder what exactly it is you go out for. What sort of things are going through your mind? You look straight ahead, far into the distance and I wonder, do your thoughts travel that far too, or do they stay close to home, wrapped up in yourself?"

"La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n’est que le prestige d’un moment; l’œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme."

"It was there he composed these most beautiful of short pages which he modestly entitled the Preludes. They are masterpieces. Several bring to mind visions of deceased monks and the sound of funeral chants; others are melancholy and fragrant; they came to him in times of sun and health, in the clamor of laughing children under he window, the faraway sound of guitars, birdsongs from the moist leaves, in the sight of the small pale roses coming in bloom on the snow. … Still others are of a mournful sadness, and while charming your ear, they break your heart. There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain — it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at out "encampment." The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, "Ah, I was sure that you were dead." When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguished the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy while playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should intepret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might — and he was right to — against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky. … The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power."

"Apprendre à voir, voilà tout le secret des études naturelles."

"On est heureux par soi-même quand on sait s'y prendre, avoir des goûts simples, un certain courage, une certaine abnégation, l'amour du travail et avant tout une bonne conscience."

"Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."

"Without our even realizing it, literature performs its miracles. It revives the poetry of former days; and, putting to rest in the past all that had been for intellectuals of the past the object of just criticisms, it brings to us, like a forgotten perfume, the unrecognized riches of a taste that is no longer open to discussion, since it no longer reigns arbitrarily. Art, although it poses as egotistical ("art for art's sake"), creates progressive philosophy without realizing it. It makes its peace with the mistakes and shortcomings of the past, to preserve, as in a museum, the monuments of its conquest. (chapter 18)"

"one should always judge youth leniently. Certainly it would be unfair to pass dogmatic judgment upon what is spontaneous and consequently naïve."

"L'art n'est pas une étude de la réalité positive; c'est une recherche de la vérité idéale."

"Je vois sur leurs nobles fronts le sceau du Seigneur, car ils sont nés rois de la terre bien mieux que ceux qui la possèdent pour l'avoir payée."

"Les chefs-d'oeuvre ne sont jamais que des tentatives heureuses."

"L'art est une démonstration dont la nature est la preuve."

"L'art pour l'art est un vain mot. L'art pour le vrai, l'art pour le beau et le bon, voilà la religion que je cherche...."