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"To fuel yet another war this time against Iraq by cynically manipulating people's grief, by packaging it for TVspecials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain itof meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillagingof even the most private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent thing for a State to do to itspeople."
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"Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy."

"Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives."

"So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it."

"No, we love war.War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment."It's the mark of a very, very young soul, Mr. Whittier used to say, "to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers."

"It was necessary, we felt, to thoroughly terrify our opponents, so that even in hollow victory, they would learn to fear every sunrise ..."
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"Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable too?"

"It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness."

"Sitting next to Tilo, breathing next to her, he felt like an empty house whose locked windows and doors were creaking open a little, to air the ghosts trapped inside it."

"She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims..."

"For many people, the family is portrayed as the settled place of reasonable safety, but as anyone who has read 'The God of Small Things' would know, for me it was a dangerous place. I felt humiliated in that space. I wanted to get away as soon as I could."

"She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself."

"If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight between the poorest people in the poorest quarters - the Adivasis and the Dalits. And in the meantime, the zamindars are laying the oil pipelines and selling both parties weapons."
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