Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by N.K. Jemisin

Quote by N.K. Jemisin

Work

How Long 'til Black Future Month?

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

N.K. Jemisin
N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin is an American science fiction writer born in September 1972. Her works are known for their unique world-building, profound character development, and rich imagination. Jemisin gained widespread acclaim with her 'Inkwood' series, which includes 'The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms', 'The Broken Kingdoms', and 'The Kingdom of the Gods', with 'The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms' winning the Hugo Award in 2011. more

You May Also Like

“There was another reason why the dollar's hegemony grew: the intentional impoverishment of America's working class. A cynic will tell you quite accurately that large quantities of money are attracted to countries where the profit rate is higher. For Wall Street to exercise fully its magnetic powers over foreign capital, profit margins in the United States had to catch up with profit rates in Germany and Japan. A quick and dirty way to do this was to suppress American wages. Cheaper labour makes for lower costs, makes for larger margins. It is no coincidence that, to this day, American working class earnings languish below their 1974 level. It is also no coincidence that union-busting became a thing in the 1970s, culminating in Ronald Reagan's dismissal of every single unionised air traffic controller. A move emulated by Margaret Thatcher in Britain who pulverised whole industries in order to eliminate the trade unions that inhabited them. And faced with the Minotaur's sucking most of the world's capital into America, the European ruling classes reckoned that they had no alternative but to do the same. Reagan had set the pace. Thatcher had shown the way. But it was in Germany and later across continental Europe that the new class war - you might call it universal austerity - was waged most effectively.”

PovertyCapitalismClass WarfareAusterity
Book:Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
Create image

“How can I describe my life in the years leading up to this moment except in shades of gray? All the scrape and grind of it, all the empty shelves and lost ambition, all the soot grown hard on windows, season after season the only black harvest. The bad news, the debts, the visa applications, the flesh of your arm humping white between a nurse's fingers as she stuck you with a paltry twelve months' protection against whatever new strain of disease, as if bankruptcy or homelessness or a weariness at aping at the motions of life weren't more likely to kill you first.”

ChallengesPovertyIllnessDebtDifficultiesScraping By
Book:Land of Milk and Honey
Create image

“If ever I have property and a house, like this, and slaves in such numbers as Vinicius, perhaps I shall be a Christian as long as may be convenient. For a rich man can permit himself everything, even virtue. This is a religion for the rich; hence I do not understand how there are so many poor among its adherents. What good is it for them, and why do they let virtue tie their hands?”

ReligionWealthChristianityClassPovertyVirtue
Book:Quo Vadis?
Create image

“Industry without art is brutality. Art is specifically human. None of those primitive peoples, past or present, whose culture we affect to despise and propose to amend, has dispensed with art; from the stone age onwards, everything made by man, under whatever conditions of hardship or poverty, has been made by art to serve a double purpose, at once utilitarian and ideological. It is we who, collectively speaking at least, command amply sufficient resources, and who do not shrink from wasting these resources, who have first proposed to make a division of art, one sort to be barely utilitarian, the other luxurious, and altogether omitting what was once the highest function of art, to express and to communicate ideas.”

ArtCultureWealthBeautyPovertyFunctionLuxuryUtilitySophistication
Book:Christian & Oriental Philosophy of Art Formerly: "Why Exhibit Works of Art?"
Create image