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Radical Quotes

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Radical Quotes

“Jesus made a series of the most radical claims that have ever been spoken. “I am the eternal God who created everything. I have power to do anything. I have gained victory over death. I will give you eternal life if you believe in me.” He promises to anyone willing to trust in Him that death will not be their end.”

“The patriarchy longs for the days 'when men were men' and women were oppressed, subservient - and they can see no wrong in it. It justifies its former power and lust to hold on to it - and if possible, to regain it by quoting fundamentalist and radical religion and tradition and calling it 'love'. Some love. How can oppression and power over another person's life ever be 'love'?”

“It was hard to force people to give up their rights to apartments, and predictably, this radical Utopian ideal failed. But it does illustrate how the concept of social injustice in a communist society works: those who have are exceptions, and they should feel guilty and ashamed - the others are entitled to have, too, because it has been promised to them.”

“When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold these notions have never renounced the male behaviours, privileges, values and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.”

“Kirillov remained silent. 'You know what, in my opinion, your belief is even stronger than a priest's.' In whom? In Him? Listen.' Kirillov stopped pacing, and stared straight before him with a fixed and ecstatic look. 'Listen to a great idea. There was a certain day on earth, and in the centre of the earth stood three crosses. One man on a cross believed to such an extent that he said to another: "Today you will be with me in paradise." The day ended, both died, they went and they found nothing - neither paradise nor resurrection. What had been said proved unjustified. Listen: this man was the highest on the entire earth, he comprised that which allowed it to live. The entire planet, with everything on it, is nothing but madness without that man. There has never been one like Him, either before or after, even by virtue of a miracle. The miracle is that there never has been nor will there be another such man, ever. And if that's so, if the laws of nature didn't spare even This One, didn't even spare his miracle, but compelled even Him to live amidst a lie and to die for a lie, then it follows that the entire planet is a lie and rests on a lie and on a stupid joke. It follows that the very laws of the planet are a lie and a farce put on by the Devil. What's there to live for, answer me, if you are a man?”

“This book was under arrest, along with its author. This event occurred on March 27, 1986. During that time, the totalitarian system in East Europe was called socialism and even by the scientific nonsense and absurd names of Communism and Communist system. In this system, the official ideology was allegedly Marxism, but really it could not endure any Marxist criticism. Since this “socialist” system was afraid of the weapon of criticism, it applied criticism of the weapon against its own citizens, as Marx would have said.”

“Many people villainize those who have stood against corrupt systems and have faced the brutal tyranny that is unleashed when people of integrity stand against the sinister agendas of the depraved. Others have blasted those who refused to align themselves with the prolific propagation of toxic ideals and have subsequently faced the wrath of those who (out of their own fear) demand blind adherence to those ideals. Yet, the greatest madness is not found in the fact that people do these things. Rather, the greatest madness is found in the fact that we do nothing about the fact that they’re doing these things.”

“Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower. The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the minimum wage—which sets a floor for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today, it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15.”

“In the conditions of this “New World Order,” a crucial part of the contemporary world economy is a criminal economy, in which the excess profits are accumulated not by the production of material comforts, but by drug-traffic, arms trafficking, and human trafficking, including prostitution. The contemporary world economy is an economy of the global organized criminality whose eminently form is the modern capitalist state. The contemporary world economy is an economy not of the real commodity production, but an economy of the jobbery; this is expressed directly in supply and demand of the capital of the speculation, i.e., in the fictitious capital trade, in the antagonistic games with share capital in the stock exchange. Just Wall Street’s stock exchange, i.e., the world speculative capital market, is the contemporary tremendous pump for inflation of the balloons of the world economic crises, the last one of which began in 2007. The aggregate amount of the bonds on the world market, as many economists know, is over one hundred trillion US dollars! Without taking in mind the derivatives! If including those, the aggregate amount is several times more! This is an enormous balloon as inflated as a red giant star! And when added to this amount the world market of the shares, the passing each other between real and fictitious capital grows to cosmic dimensions! This cosmic balloon will burst very soon! That means the most destructive capitalist crisis in human history lies just round the corner, the global economic apocalypse is just forthcoming! This ruin will be due to the stock exchange antagonistic games, the stock exchange that is, as a matter of fact, a gambling house! Because the securities and shares’ trading is sheer gambling! This becomes clear by the direct proportionality between risk and profitability, the more risk—the more profitability, and vice versa! However, this is gambling in which the stakes are not simply money, but millions and billions of human fates. So, this is a destroying-the-civilization-world crime economy!”

“Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind ... when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only conscious organization of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal.”

“The societal and political manifestation of disbelief (of belief that we make ourselves and are only what we make ourselves) is, of course, the world of liberal individualism - the world of isolated individuals asserting their freedom against each other. And, of course, if this is what society is like, you need a state whose job it is to control and limit the freedom of its citizens. The world that believes in the autonomous free individual also has to believe in the bureaucratic state. Society is seen as a perpetual struggle between these two - sometimes emphasizing the individual, sometimes the collective. But all this is the world of disbelief, the world without God. This is the world from which Jesus came to redeem us, to give us faith in his Father's love so that we do not need to assert ourselves and our innocence and our lightness, so that we can relax and confess the truth about ourselves, so that we stop judging ourselves and others, because we know that it doesn't matter: God loves us anyway, so that we are liberated enough to risk being vulnerable to others - liberated enough to risk loving and being loved by others, liberated enough to know that we belong to each other because we belong to God. In that world we will not cling fanatically to particular formulas and doctrines simply because they are our security, any more than we cling to our own righteousness. We can be relaxed either way. In such a world a belief that we are called to share in divine life, and do already share in it, can go with a clear awareness of our own weakness and inadequacy and sin. And in such a world believing in God's love can go with a critical awareness of the weakness and inadequacy of our ways of expressing it. Our belief can, and indeed must, go with a certain kind of searching and questioning, a certain kind of doubt. Faith will exclude doubt altogether only when it ceases to be faith and becomes the vision of the eternal love which is God.”

“Everything feels utopian at some point or another. The ideas we have accepted today felt utopian in the previous era. If reformers would have given up their 'fight to abolish Sati' as an utopian idea, we would have never gotten rid of the practice. The question is; how far is our generation ready to go against the grain, when we see injustice happening in our day? Are we ready to introspect, why the idea of brotherhood across religious and caste lines feels utopian and radical today?”

“Can you imagine … it’s now up to the common herd to decide what outsiderism is, and how it should be presented. Real outsiders don’t give a fuck what a bunch of liberal cunts think. That’s exactly what radicals are opposed to. Can you imagine – the outsider without an outside … the outsider acceptable to the flock, the sheeple. Isn’t that the definition of an insider? You can’t be a Gadfly if you don’t piss anyone off.”

“...an actualized poem requires the actualization, or radical transformation, of the poet - that a poem is the discovery and enactment of an emotional and psychological investigation into the vexed interiority of a speaker, that the interior is indeed political - and that every poem, every time, in some miraculous way, must be an argument about the making of poetry itself.”

“It may seem paradoxical that opposing what one scholar calls "the slow violence of settler colonialism" should lead people to celebrate the quick violence of terrorism. But part of the appeal of radical ideologies, of the right and the left, is that they make violence virtuous. And October 7 marked the moment when settler colonialism emerged into public view as the watchword of a new ideology, one that is already influencing the way many Americans think about their country and the world.”

“The Jacobins were the standard bearers of the left. Liberals are not on the left. They are in the center, and often trending right with their hatred of the State and any possibility of State social engineering on the grand scale. It has been rightly observed that the hallmark of liberalism is wanting the “thing without the thing”, as Slavoj Zizek famously put it. The liberals want war without war, revolution without revolution, drugs without any of the downside of drugs, coffee without caffeine. They want a situation that inevitably leads to violence, without the violence. They immediately condemn the violence even though violence was implicit in the entire project from the get-go.”

“The media and the internet exist not to transmit knowledge as it is, but to amplify, exaggerate, and embellish the exact reality. Whatever is displayed upon the screens is rendered greater and more dramatic than its true form to attract mass interest. And if a person’s only “source of knowledge” is their screen, then that person may become stranded in a rigid world of black and white, blinded to the spectrum of grays that lie between.”

“Labelling is no longer a liberating political act but a necessity in order to gain entrance into the academic industrial complex and other discussions and spaces. For example, if so called “radical” or “progressive” people don’t hear enough “buzz” words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. The criteria for identifying as a feminist by academic institutions, peer reviewed journals, national bodies, conferences, and other knowledge gatekeepers is very exclusive. It is based on academic theory instead of based on lived experiences or values. Name-dropping is so elitist! You're not a "real" feminist unless you can quote, or have read the following white women: (insert Women's Studies 101 readings).”

“Being exposed to those beauty queens and Praying Mantises at the same time made me ask myself some hard questions. Would I have been so radical had I not been so fat? Could I have been one of the women on the other side parading my beauty of which I was so proud? As I stood there holding my JUDGE MEAT NOT WOMEN picket sign, I recalled all the people who had said to me throughout my life, "You've got such a pretty face." But they never finished the thought. The whole phrase is "You've got such a pretty face, too bad you're fat." But what if I weren't fat? Would I still have attacked this "Meat Parade" so fiercely? The truth is, my fat has informed my politics. And while I'd like to think I would have been just as ardent in my opposition to the objectification of women had I been thin, I'll never know for sure.”

“You religious men who boast so much that you live on charity including what the poor manage to scrape together out of their meagre income - how can you justify your actions? How can your moral conscience be clear when you acknowledge that in no way do you contribute to the society that is maintaining you, day after day? In your self complacent conceit, you denigrate and harshly condemn, those who, with their sweat and hard work, provide you with a life fit for a king. What is the reason you spend your lives living comfortably in some ashram or isolated monastery when life only makes sense if it is experienced with your fellow brothers and sisters by showing compassion to them? It is easy and simple enough to spend your lives meditating in the Himalayas being irritated by nothing and no one if not the occasional goat, rather than placing yourselves in the midst of your fellow men and living an ordinary life of toil as they do. Do not delude yourselves, because what you refer to as a state of internal peace represents nothing but the personal satisfaction of the conscious ego that is admiring and adoring itself..”