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Quotes | SAR IV

Quotes to be included in the fourth print issue.

Published onNov 30, 2020
Quotes | SAR IV

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.

However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different than ours? “If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child.

— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” Sister Outsider, 1984

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To be born with both beauty and self-respect in the Negro ghetto of Baltimore in 1915 was too much of a handicap, even without rape at the age of ten and drug-addiction in her teens. But, while she destroyed herself, she sang, unmelodious, profound and heartbreaking. It is impossible not to weep for her, or not to hate the world which made her what she was.

— E. J. Hobsbawm, “Billie Holiday,” in Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), 294.

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One general possibility for solving the overgrazing problem — beyond the enclosure of commons — seems to be nationalization of cows.

— Mattei, Ugo, and Mark Mancall. “Communology:” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 118, no. 4, Duke University Press, Oct. 2019, pp. 725–46. Crossref, doi:10.1215/00382876-7825576.

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We don’t believe what they say about us.

— Italian feminist slogan, qtd. in “The Virus Is our Idea of Ourselves,” textz.com, accessed September 4, 2020.

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To investigate the genealogy of the state is to discover that there has never been any agreed concept to which the word state has answered.

— Skinner, Quentin. “The Sovereign State: A Genealogy.” Sovereignty in Fragments, edited by Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner, Cambridge University Press, pp. 26–46. Crossref, doi:10.1017/cbo9780511675928.002.

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It is not a matter of asking whether but of determining precisely and to what extent the stories engage colonialism. The work of interpreting the relation of colonialism and science fiction really gets under way, then, by attempting to decipher the fiction's often distorted and topsy-turvy references to colonialism. Only then can one propet ask how . . . science fiction lives and breathes in the atmosphere of colonial history and its discourses, how it reflects or contributes to ideological production of ideas about the shape of history, and how it might, in varying degrees, enact a struggle over humankind’s ability to reshape it.

— John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction as qtd in Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, NYU Press, 2020, pg 126.

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The recent history of education reform is also the recent history of the centralisation of state power. Another bleak irony: the Conservatives like to present themselves as the party upholding the general libertarian values of freedom and democracy; in practice they have actively disempowered local democracy because of the potential challenge posed by councils to their political authority.

— Robb Johnson, The People’s Republic of Neverland: The Child versus the State, PM Press, 2020, pg. 90.

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A dog’s obeyed in office.

— William Shakespeare, King Lear

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The laissez-faire is also a mode of state regulation, introduced and maintained by legislative and constraining means. It is a deliberate policy, aware of its own objectives, and not the spontaneous and automatic expression of the economic events. Consequently, laissez-faire liberalism is a political program.”

Gramsci, Quaderni, qtd. in Empire & Imperialism: A Critical Reading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri by Atilio A. Boron, pg. 52.

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A come. consisting of Mr. Madison, Mr. Mifflin & Mr. Williamson reported in consequence of a motion of Mr. Bland, a list of books proper for the use of Congress, and proposed that the Secy. sho’d be instructed to procure the same.8 In favr. of the Rept. it was urged as indispensable that Congress sd. have at all times at command such authors on the law of Nations, treaties Negociations &c as wd. render their proceedings in such cases conformable to propriety; and it was observed that the want of this information was manifest in several important acts of Congress. It was further observed that no time ought to be lost in collecting every book & tract which related to American Antiquities & the affairs of the U.S. since many of the most valuable of these were every day becoming extinct, & they were necessary not only as materials for a Hist: of the U.S. but might be rendered still more so by future pretensions agst. their rights from Spain or other powers which had shared in the discoveries & possessions of the New World.9 Agst. the Report were urged 1st. the inconveniency of advancing even a few hundred pounds at this crisis; 2dly. the difference of expence between procuring the books during the war & after a peace. These objections prevailed, by a considerable majority. A motion was then made by Mr. Wilson 2ded. by Mr. Madison to confine the purchase for the present to the most essential part of the books. This also was negatived.

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Since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future, will one day take arms and hang the traitors to this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.

— Dimitris Christoulas, a 77-year old pensioner who committed suicide in Greece’s Syntagma square on April 4, 2012, as qtd. in Social Movements and Solidarity Structures in Crisis-Ridden Greece, pg. 73-74.

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