Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Hope Jahren

Quote by Hope Jahren

“There is no time to discuss the fact that this horrible, horrible system is not working, or to assert that we are neither criminals or machines. There are only endless medication orders, given by exhausted people with nobody better than us to depend on.”

Quote by Hope Jahren

Work

Lab Girl

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Hope Jahren

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Hope Jahren. more

You May Also Like

“Why we have such a frightening rise in mental health illnesses in our country? Are there legitimate causes, or do we have a whole mental health industrial complex benefiting from over diagnosing, over prescribing, and over pathologizing? Have we created such a stifling, unfair, and unfulfilling society, including employment and social conditions, that have caused so much depression and other mental health illnesses to an increasing number of people? Or is it a combination of all these issues?”

“Imagine if one should drag an innocent passer-by from the street to the operating room of a nearby hospital and force him at gunpoint to perform a delicate operation. The man would burst into tears. However, if one were to ask him to sound off on problems such as nuclear experiments, Vietnam, the borders of Israel, support for Indonesia, aid to Latin America, or recognition of Red China, in most cases he would start spouting opinions.”

“About the principle of representation and the concept of a parliament, today we have grown accustomed to associating them exclusively with the system of absolute democracy, based on universal suffrage and the principle of one man, one vote. This basis is absurd and indicates more than anything else the individualism that, combined with the pure criterion of quantity and of number, defines modern democracy. We say individualism in the bad sense, because here we are dealing with the individual as an abstract, atomistic and statistical unity, not as a ‘person’, because the quality of a person — that is, a being that has a specific dignity, a unique quality and differentiated traits—is obviously negated and offended in a system in which one vote is the equal of any other, in which the vote of a great thinker, a prince of the Church, an eminent jurist or sociologist, the commander of an army, and so on has the same weight, measured by counting votes, as the vote of an illiterate butcher’s boy, a halfwit, or the ordinary man in the street who allows himself to be influenced in public meetings, or who votes for whoever pays him. The fact that we can talk about ‘progress’ in reference to a society where we have reached the level of considering all this as normal is one of the many absurdities that, perhaps, in better times will be the cause of amazement or amusement.”

“[I]t was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that black citizens had proper recourse for violations of their voting rights through the Department of Justice. . . . .The Voting Rights Act itself was weakened by a 2013 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned the act's most effective enforcement tool, Section 5, requiring jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimmination to seek federal approval before making any changes to voting rules. Voter suppression, not only in the nothern states, but in districts with minority populations within many other states all around the country, remains a pressing problem. Access to tje vote is still manipulated for partisan political advantage, amd true universal suffrage remains an elusive goal.”

“Unlike conservatives and cautious liberals, fascists never wanted to keep the masses out of politics. They wanted to enlist, discipline, and energize them. In any event, by the end of World War I, there was no possible turning back to a narrow suffrage. Young men almost everywhere had been summoned to die for their countries, and one could hardly deny the full rights of citizenship to any of them. Women, too, whose economic and social roles the war had expanded enormously, received the vote in many northern European countries (though not yet in France, Italy, Spain, or Switzerland). While fascists sought to restore patriarchy in the family and the workplace, they preferred to mobilize sympathetic women rather than disfranchise them, at least until they could abolish voting altogether.”