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Quote by Nawal El Saadawi

“My life means their death. My death means their life. And life for them means more crime, more plunder, unlimited booty.”

Quote by Nawal El Saadawi

Author

Nawal El Saadawi
Nawal El Saadawi

Nawal El Saadawi is an Egyptian writer, physician, and feminist. Her works widely address themes such as women's status, gender equality, and social justice. Born on October 27, 1931, her works have had a profound impact in the Arab world and globally. more

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“A society like the Italian, the very disorder of which renders the action of the State useless and ridiculous, is not without its charm and helps us to grasp this political truth: the principal task of the State today is to justify its own existence. To do so, it has to annihilate society's capacity to survive by itself. Surreptitiously undermining all forms of spontaneous regulation, deregulating, desocializing, breaking down the traditional mechanisms of bodies and antibodies, in order to substitute its artificial mechanisms - such is the strategy of a State locked in a subtle struggle with society - exactly like medicine, which lives off the destruction of natural defences and their replacement by artificial ones. In Rome, Niccolini manages to counter the obsessive fear of terrorism with a cultural revival. To the Romans who no longer dare go out in the evenings he offers festivals, performances, poetry galas. He brings culture down into the street. He combats the terrorist festival with the cultural, advertising festival. He will be criticized for wasteful expenditure, but the only way to fight terrorism is not to create 'solid' institutions, but to put upon the stage a culture that is as sacrificial, eccentric, and ephemeral as the terrorist acts themselves. One festival against the other. If terrorism is a sort of murderous advertising campaign which keeps our imagination on tenterhooks, it can be countered only by a piece of even more effective advertising.”

“Very few people I knew voted for Reagan, but given that he didn't do anything crazy and started making peace with the Soviet Union, affluent college-educated people, liberals and otherwise, didn't disagree very ferociously about politics in the 1980s and '90s, and certainly not about economics. In retrospect, that rough consensus looks like the beginning of an unspoken class solidarity among the bourgeoisie--nearly everyone suspicious of economic populism, but some among us, the Republicans, more suspicious that the rest. Affluent college-educated people, Democrats as well as Republicans, began using the phrase socially liberal but fiscally conservative to describe their politics, which meant low taxes in return for tolerance of ...whatever, as long it didn't cost affluent people anything. It was a libertarianism lite that kept everything nice and clubbable and, unlike Republican conservatism, at least had the virtue of ideological consistency.”

“Selective kindness isn’t high-mindedness. The Higher Mind exhibits these traits all the time. He’s high-minded universally, as a general principle, and applies it to everyone equally. Selective kindness is a Primitive Mind trick that appears to be high-mindedness, if you’re not paying close enough attention. Remember, at first glance, ants seemed like nice people too. That’s why the litmus test of anyone’s true colors—the revealer of which mind is running the show in their head—is how they treat people outside their tribe. Both the Higher Mind and Primitive Mind tend to treat fellow tribesmen with kindness, so that tells you nothing—it’s when dealing with Them that the two minds diverge.”