Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Margaret Atwood

Quote by Margaret Atwood

Work

Oryx And Crake

The story follows the lives of Crash and his wife, Snow, as they navigate a world transformed by the actions of their childhood friend, Jimmy. The narrative intertwines with the story of Oryx and Crake, who have created a new, idealized society. The novel delves into complex questions about the nature of humanity, the role of science, and the potential consequences of our actions. more

Author

Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a renowned Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, and critic, born on November 18, 1939. Her works are known for their unique style and profound insights into social issues, with notable titles including 'The Handmaid's Tale' and 'Cat's Eye'. more

You May Also Like

“You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff. A related phenomenon is the ongoing transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb 'to like' from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse: from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture's substitution for loving.”

LoveLikeCommodificationLiking
Book:Farther Away
Create image

“Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of.”

CapitalismSlaveryResistanceOppressionColonialismExploitationCommodificationCapitalistsHuman Commodification
Book:A Small Place
Create image

“The presence of God is so important in the life of believers. There is abundance of all you need to make your life comfortable in His presence.”

LifeBookInspirationSuccessReadingPresidentLeadershipWealthMoneyBusinessRelationshipSecuritySelf HelpGreatnessRevolutionFameImprovementEntrepreneurshipIntimacyImmortalityAspirationAccomplishmentsNicheRisk ItBe DifferentGreater GloryThe Best OptionHigher LivingThe Prince And The PauperJaachynmaAmazomForbesRichestChiyson
Book:The Prince and the Pauper
Create image

“As discussed earlier, humans who lack the reflective self-awareness of normal adults, such as those with particular forms of amnesia or very young children or those with certain mental disabilities, still are self-aware and still have an interest in continuing to live. There may, of course, be a difference between the self-awareness of normal adult humans and that of other animals. But even if that is the case, it does not mean that the latter have no interest in continuing to live, and it does not justify treating the latter as commodities.”

JusticeAnimalsVegetarianismVeganismWill To LiveCommodification
Author:Gary L. Francione
Create image

“People are trained – brainwashed – to believe that material well-being stands for psychological well-being. If you have a house, a job, a car, lots of commodities, a partner and family then you ought to be happy. But where is the real you in all of that? Of course, psychological well-being, not material well-being, should be the benchmark. But we live in a materialist world thanks to economic materialism (predatory capitalism) and philosophical materialism (scientism). Science more or less denies that we have minds and free will, hence are just machines, while predatory capitalism treats us as material objects. Mind – the psyche, psychology – is exactly what is absent from the materialist hegemony, and that’s why the world is so anxious, depressed and alienated. It comes with the territory. It’s an inevitable aspect of materialism. Materialism shapes us as matter. Consumerism shapes us as consumers. The class system locks us into artificial class identities. In a world of commodities, we ourselves are commodified. All of our values start to revolve around objects, things, commodities, consumption, matter. The human has disappeared. We need to revalue all values in terms of idealism rather than materialism, and rationalism instead of empiricism.”

ScienceCapitalismMaterialismCommodification
Book:The Irresistible Rise of Mediocre Man: The War On Excellence
Create image

“The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas. In this regard, the economic enterprise of human trafficking marked a watershed in what would become an enduring project in the modern Western world: probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within. The aim in the case being economic efficiency rather than punishment, this was a regime whose intent was not to torture but rather to manage the depletion of life that resulted from the conditions of saltwater slavery. But for the Africans who were starved, sorted, and warped to make them into saltwater slaves, torture was the result. It takes no great insight to point to the role of violence in the Atlantic slave trade. But to understand what happened to Africans in this system of human trafficking requires us to ask precisely what kind of violence it requires to achieve its end, the transformation of African captives into Atlantic commodities.”

HumanitySlaveryFree WillCommodificationHumanization
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Create image

“Turning captives into commodities was a thoroughly scientific enterprise. It turned on perfecting the practices required to commodify people and determining where those practices reached their outer limits (that is, the point at which they extinguished the lives they were meant to sustain in commodified form). Traders reduced people to the sum of their biological parts, thereby scaling life down to an arithmetical equation and finding the lowest common denominator.”

Free WillDehumanizationCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Create image

“The slave ship at sea reduced African captives to an existence so physically atomized as to silence all but the most elemental bodily articulation, so socially impoverished as to threaten annihilation of the self, the complete disintegration of personhood. Here their commodification built toward a crescendo that threatened never to arrive, but to leave the African captives suspended in an agony whose language no one knew.”

TraumaDehumanizationCommodificationMiddle Passage
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Create image