Castes Quotes - Page 6

• I actually did a quick survey of how caste plays out in contemporary India. The idea that democracy and development have in some ways eroded caste turned out not to be the case, that it has in fact been entrenched and modernised.

  Arundhati Roy

  Play, Ideas, Democracy

  Interview with Rumnique Nannar, www.pakistantoday.com.pk. April 5, 2014.

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• Last evening attended Croghan Lodge International Order of Odd Fellows. Election of officers. Chosen Noble Grand. These social organizations have a number of good results. All who attend are educated in self-government. This in a marked way. They bind society together. The well-to-do and the poor should be brought together as much as possible. The separation into classes--castes--is our danger. It is the danger of all civilizations.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Civilization, Class, Organization

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• As a criminal you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

  Michelle Alexander

  Men, Rights, America

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Party, Home, New Orleans

  "Come Hell or High Water". Book by Michael Eric Dyson, www.today.com. 2006.

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• ...heroine: the artist, the premier mistress writhering in a garden graced w/highly polished blades of grass... release (ethiopium) is the drug...an animal howl says it all...notes pour into the caste of freedom...the freedom to be intense...to defy social order and break the slow kill monotony of censorship. to break from the long bonds of servitude-ruthless adoration of the celestial shepherd. let us celebrate our own flesh-to embrace not ones race mais the marathon-to never let go of the fiery sadness called desire.

  Patti Smith

  Letting Go, Sadness, Garden

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• I believe, Messieurs, in loyalty---to one's friends and one's family and one's caste.

  Agatha Christie

  Loyalty, Believe, I Believe

  Agatha Christie (1960). “Dame Agatha abroad”

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• ...the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

  George Orwell

  War, Survival, Consciousness

  George Orwell (1983). “1984”, p.415, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.

  John Green

  Thinking, House, Warfare

  John Green (2013). “Paper Towns”, p.226, A&C Black

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• A new race-neutral language was developed for appealing to old racist sentiments, a language accompanied by a political movement that succeeded in putting the vast majority of backs back in their place. Proponents of racial hierarchy found they could install a new racial caste system without violating the law or the new limits of acceptable political discourse, by demanding 'law and order' rather than 'segregation forever'.

  Michelle Alexander

  Race, Order, Law

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• I think that Indian writing in English is a really peculiar beast. I can't think of any literature - perhaps Russian literature in the nineteenth century comes close - so exclusively produced by and closely identified with a tiny but powerful ruling elite, the upper-caste, Anglophone upper middle class, and dependent for so long on book buyers and readers elsewhere.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Powerful, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity — a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.

  Isaac Asimov

  Fall, Gentleman, Curiosity

  Isaac Asimov (1986). “Foundation Trilogy”, Del Rey

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• "Cynicism," like "heresy" and "heterodoxy" and "atheism" and "agnosticism" and "paganism" and "heathenism," is above all else a way for organized orthodoxy's caste of official censors to encyst and segregate and thus neutralize all contrarian forms of seeing and thinking, all (necessarily implicitly) prohibited and repressed ways of exercising disruptive and iconoclastic intuition and intellection (for to analyze and explain these things too openly is to give them publicity and potential cogency when the point is to asphyxiate them).

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Exercise, Thinking

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• We call upon all communities to be tolerant, to reject prejudice based on caste, creed, sect, colour, religion or agenda to ensure freedom and equality for women so they can flourish. We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back.

  Malala Yousafzai

  Color, Community, Prejudice

  Malala Yousafzai's speech to the UN General Assembly, www.independent.co.uk. July 12, 2013.

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• The short interregnum of civil society built on the ruins of the Bastille came to its end with the establishment of the Jews as the new Priestly caste. The alternative Church of our society, the Jews, survived in abeyance for hundreds of years. As long as the Christian Church attended to the discourse, the Jews plainly had no chance to compete; but when its power was broken by liberty-seekers, the alternative arrangement came forward.

  Israel Shamir

  Christian, Years, Long

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• At the same time as woman was becoming the showcase for wealth and caste, while men were slipping into relative anonymity and "handsome is as handsome does," she was emerging as the central emblem of western art.

  Germaine Greer

  Art, Men, Doe

  Germaine Greer (1972). “The female eunuch”

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• I had grown up in a privileged, upper-caste Hindu community; and because my father worked for a Catholic hospital, we lived in a prosperous Christian neighborhood.

  Aravind Adiga

  Christian, Father, Community

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• Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't want to talk about it because there had been pain and heartbreak under the caste system of the South. They didn't want to burden their children with what they had endured.

  Isabel Wilkerson

  Children, Pain, Home

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• That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. They didn't look back, and they often didn't tell their children about it. They didn't want to talk about it. It was too painful, what they'd gone through and the caste system of the South, which was Jim Crow.

  Isabel Wilkerson

  Children, Loss, Thinking

  "Journalist Isabel Wilkerson". "Tavis Smiley", www.pbs.org. December 23, 2010.

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• I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.

  Bharati Mukherjee

  Father, Home, Writing

  "American Dreamer". www.motherjones.com. January/February 1997.

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• Everything is un-American that tends either to government by a plutocracy or government by a mob. To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American. All privileges based on wealth, and all enmity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American-both of them equally so. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Men, America, Safety

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• We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.

  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

  Dog, Cat, Hierarchy

  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (2001). “The Tribe of Tiger”, p.71, Simon and Schuster

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• If we claim heritage in Bacon, Shakespeare and Milton, we also acknowledge that it was for liberties guaranteed Englishmen by sacred charters our fathers triumphantly fought. While wisely rejecting throne and caste and privilege and an Established Church in their new-born state, they adopted the substance of English liberty and the body of English law.

  Chauncey Depew

  Father, Law, Church

  Chauncey Mitchell Depew (1910). “Oration and memorial addresses”

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• An artist has to be humble, an editor must be officious, and a publisher must be somewhere out in the galaxy enjoying godhood. It was a caste system, pure and simple. And it was accepted that way. Nobody thought of contracts, nobody thought of insisting on better deals.

  Jack Kirby

  Humble, Artist, Simple

  Interview with Gary Groth, www.tcj.com. February 1990.

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• As Indian citizens, we subsist on a regular diet of caste massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breakings and fashion shows, church burnings and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labor and the digital revolution, female infanticide and the NASDAQ crash, husbands who continue to burn their wives for dowry and our delectable stockpile of Miss Worlds. What's hard to reconcile oneself to, both personally and politically, is the schizophrenic nature of it.

  Arundhati Roy

  Fashion, Husband, Cells

  Arundhati Roy (2001). “Power Politics”, South End Pr

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• As the dog becomes thoroughbred in the laws of clan and caste; obedient, fraternal and loyal; so is the man who accepts the gentleman's code.

  Gelett Burgess

  Dog, Men, Law

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