"I continue to think that it is an unfortunate fact of everyday consciousness in the U.S. because of its racism and its sexism, that somehow the mere fact of representation is what the entire struggle has been for."

"the economic sanctions and embargoes are no less expressions of organized violence that result in premature death than the military incursions."

"The only way that inviolability has maintained its force overtime has been through the forces of organized violence standing between that concept of property and everybody else. That is it...the forces of organized violence, while very much tied to military uniforms, weapons, industrialized killing in that way, what Rosa Luxemburg called organized murder"

"the relationship between large-scale capitalist activity and the forces of organized violence have been intimate for the entire history of capitalism"

"I learned as a child that despair is a luxury I just don’t have a right to."

"what spurred and motivated a lot of people to very good organizing, starting with Bob Bullard’s Dumping in Dixie exposé of how environmental racism was encountered with impunity by these big corporations throwing lead, and you name it, various carcinogens into people’s water tables and so on and so forth."

"the extraction of time from people who are detained, captured, disappeared, incarcerated is the annihilation of space by time, which is something that nappy haired philosopher Karl Marx said in the middle of the 19th century capitalism was busily doing to the planet, annihilating space by time. And so in taking back time in the various ways that we can provisionally is indeed part of the anti-capitalist struggle when it is part of the anti-capitalist struggle."

"What prison is and unfreedom is, is the extraction of time."

"freedom is a place. That it’s not like a destination, it’s the place that we make."

"I'm genuinely just so thrilled any time people are taking actions based on a principle and a belief that what does Ruth Wilson Gilmore say-where life is precious, life is precious. That makes me very excited and happy."

"California was on a path to making what was an huge and bulging prison system to be bigger and bigger and bigger. And that’s where contemporary abolition movement in the United States took root. And we fought and fought and fought, throughout urban and rural California, making common cause with labor unions, healthcare workers, faith communities, environmental justice activists, and other, to denaturalize the notion that crime was the problem for which prisons and punishment was the right solution, as a result of which the number of people in California prisons is much lower than it was even imagined it could be in the year 2000, because of the work that abolitionists did."

"Some of the leading abolitionists in the United States and around the world today are people like Mariame Kaba and Andrea Smith and Kelly Gillespie and others, who came out of work against domestic violence — i.e. it was in doing work to try to fight against violence and harm, that they realized abolition was the only way to resolve the problems that were not being resolved by having better, faster, more swift and sure punishment when somebody harmed somebody else."

"There are many, many ways for us to think about organized abandonment, but that thinking should bring us to consider both how capital — large and small — and state — municipal or greater — work together to raise barriers to some kinds of people and lower them for others."

"In other parts of the world, what one sees is a very simple fact: Where life is precious, life is precious. In places where the state, the government, municipalities, social justice organizations, faith communities, labor unions work together to lift up human life, the incidents of crime and punishment, including the incidents of interpersonal harm, are less likely to occur. And this is in places where populations are every bit as diverse as in the United States. We also see that in places where inequality is the deepest, the use of prison and punishment is the greatest. Nowhere, however, gets even close to the United States."

"Abolition seeks to undo the way of thinking and doing things that sees prison and punishment as solutions for all kinds of social, economic, political, behavioral and interpersonal problems. Abolition, though, is not simply decarceration, put everybody out on the street. It is reorganizing how we live our lives together in the world. And this is something that people are doing in a variety of ways throughout the United States and around the planet already."

"There are all kinds of reasons to complain. Fine. That’s true of anything that we set ourselves out to do. We can complain about what’s wrong with the categories we have decided to embrace. But what abolition still gives us if we take it seriously, is a way of understanding that if freedom is a place, then abolition is life in rehearsal of making that place."

"Concerning Rwanda, I realized that someone who comes from a poor country has no rights, from the point of view of humanity, of society, of the international community, because all the interventions, all hopes of aid were based on [national] interests, not on human compassion."

"We were hiding in our house in Nyamirambo after hearing my name being read among those who had been killed. We had to bribe the police every day to remain hidden. Mr Rusesabagina, who was a family friend, called to see if we were alive. After learning that we were alive, he sent a soldier to pick us up and take us to Hotel Mille Collines. It was a dangerous journey, so we had to be driven one by one and bribed our way through the roadblocks and lied that we were Hutu. It was a miracle that we arrived at the hotel."

"There is no denying that Mr Rusesabagina risked his life to provide refuge for me and my family and many others."

"Nearly half of Rwanda’s legislators are female."

"Because of the genocide, many people didn’t want to hear about birth control"

"He(Rusesabagina) really wanted to be the star."

"Rusesabagina had been brought down by hubris — his deluded conviction that it was he"

"I could see the Interahamwe in the streets, though I was terrified to look at them"

"She was cautiously challenging the revisionist view of Rusesabagina that the government has taken such pains to propagate. “He was very humane,”"

"(fr) L’humanité a été remplacée par une valeur marchande et Rwanda a été abandonné parce qu’il n’avait pas de valeur marchande."

"Human compassion has been replaced by commercial value, and Rwanda was abandoned because the country had no commercial value."

"(fr) En tant qu’humains, nous ne valons pas grand-chose, car nous n’avons pas de grandes richesses au sous-sol que les grandes puissances convoitent, qu’on n’a pas réellement une valeur marchande."

"As human beings, we [Rwandans] are not worth much, because we have under our soil no great wealth that the great powers covet, so we do not have commercial value."

"(fr) Concernant Rwanda, je me suis rendu compte que quand on vient d’un pays pauvre, on n’a aucun droit au point de vue de l’humanité, de la société, de la communauté internationale, parce que toutes les interventions, tous les espoirs d’être aidé sont guidés par des intérêts, mais pas par l’humanité."

"(fr) Quand les événements au Rwanda en avril 1994 se sont précipités vers le génocide, j’étais vraiment découragée, désespérée, parce que je trouvais que l’universalité des droits c’était une topique réelle."

"When the events in Rwanda in April 1994 plunged toward genocide, I was really discouraged and despairing, because I found that universal rights were a real issue."

"Please, don’t forget the Rwandans who are left behind."

"When you become a leader at any level, you look beyond the borders of your problems and become a role model to the public."

"I started working with whoever would do business to me regardless of who they were or where they were from. I did this because I realised that this of negative thinking would impact the country’s development."

"resurrecting Chez Lando is a way of honoring the dead. But it is also a means of perpetuating life"

"During my time at the hotel, I have managed to renovate the building, improve service and be friendly to my employees, but of course we still have a lot to achieve"

"The prize will motivate us by adding value to what we do, but also it should be the pride to all Rwandan women and the nation at large"

"When you become a leader at any level, you look beyond the borders of your problems and become a role model to the public. When you live a life of agony, while whoever you meet is no better than you, makes people lose morale. But in this position that I was entrusted with, I had to give the best I had to the public regardless of how I felt ."

"Reaching out helped me to meet many people who were aggrieved by what happened to them during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. When this happened, somehow you feel you aren’t the only one who has problems."

"After almost everyone in my family was killed, and I happened to survive, most of the time I asked myself, what should I do to keep on moving and to stand in for my beloved ones who perished during the Genocide ."

"I never trusted anyone and I did not trust anyone. I never thought I could be a human being again. Whenever I thought about what happened to me and my family I would develop hatred for whoever I suspected had a hand in my family’s suffering ."

"If the people who carried out genocide realise what they did and they stand in solidarity with the victims, showing them the remains of their beloved ones and joining them during the commemoration time, it will speed up the healing process."

"She never wanted to speak about Auschwitz. [...] I asked her once to tell me more, and she said, 'No, I will get crazy.' So we could speak around, or after, or before, but the real moment, never. Not directly."

"Even if I have a home in Paris and sometimes in New York, whenever I was saying I have to go home, it was going to my mother. And there is 'no home' anymore, because she isn’t there, and when I came the last time, the home was empty."