Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Maya Darjani

Quote by Maya Darjani

“We talk about creating an utopia, but we install an empire and we build our success on the back of the exploited. We talk about equality, but we ignore the power structures that silence the voices of the less powerful. We talk about meritocracy, but we only promote and care for those from the core planets. We talk about science and rationality, but we pray to extinct gods and worship mutated humans.”

Quote by Maya Darjani

Book:Ancient as the Stars: A Space Opera Adventure
Create image

Work

Ancient as the Stars: A Space Opera Adventure

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Maya Darjani

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Maya Darjani. more

You May Also Like

“When I look at a pumpkin muffin, I see the brilliant orange glow of a sugar maple in its full autumnal glory. I see the crisp blue sky of October, so clear and restorative and reassuring. I see hayrides, and I feel Halloween just around the corner, kids dressed up in homemade costumes, bobbing for apples and awaiting trick or treat. I think of children dressed as Pilgrims in a pre-school parade, or a Thanksgiving feast, the bounty of harvest foods burdening a table with its goodness. I picture pumpkins at a farmer's market, piled happy and high, awaiting a new home where children will carve them into scary faces or mothers will bake them into a pie or stew.”

AutumnHalloweenOctoberReminiscencePumpkinsMuffin
Book:Slim to None
Create image

“I have this recurring nightmare in which I have to move back in with my old college roommates. I'll admit, that's what I was expecting to find at Oneida. The 19th century equivalent of sharing a house with the friend who brought home a crazy drifter to sleep on our couch - a man who claimed the local car dealership was built out of 'needles nourishing the earth'. The week before I went to Oneida, I had that claustrophobic dream again - that I had to move back in with the girl who claimed to enjoy baking and always promised tomorrow was going to be 'Muffin Day!' even though tomorrow was never Muffin Day. It was Muffin Day maybe once.”

RecurringDrifterMuffin
Book:Assassination Vacation
Create image

“For any project you need two things: people and money. I had no qualms about people. All my experience suggested I was not going to be left as a lone lawyer working from an office in a basement. Money, though, was a problem, because you can't run an independent organization in an authoritarian state without a budget. In the past, politicians had asked rich people for money, oligarchs. By 2011, however, the oligarchs wouldn't come within cannonball range of me. And neither did I want to owe them any favors. So I put a post on my blog saying, "I know how to work, I know what to do, I will find and hire the necessary number of staff, but the financing has to come from you. Give me money. You need to donate a modest amount to a good, useful project, and that will save me from having to run around trying to cadge funds from oligarchs and businessmen." These micro-donations were the base that enabled me to become independent. And there was nothing the Kremlin could do about it. It was easy for them to arrest and intimidate one or two big donors, but what could they do against tens of thousands of people? Nowadays there seems nothing special about that approach; it is standard for a fundraising campaign. But in 2011, everyone thought I was out of my mind. What on earth was a micro-donation? How could you possibly raise money for investigations and legal work online, especially in Russia? In our country no one had ever done anything like it before. There were no models to follow, there was no habit of donating regularly, there was no financial infrastructure. And yet people began transferring money to me, ordinary readers of my LiveJournal blog. At first I collected the donations in my personal account and later published a bank statement and report on my blog. The average donation to RosPil was 400 rubles (at that time about $15), and in one month I collected almost 4 million rubles, more than the annual budget I had originally set.”

FundraisingCrowdsourcing
Book:Patriot: A Memoir
Create image