Quotes About Resistance

I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.

Many people withdrew into what they called 'internal emigration'. They sheltered their secret inner lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities.

Hell had at least been familiar; she knew that, if she'd been capable of feeling anything, she would have felt afraid of this irresistible force that had picked her up like a scrap of paper and was sweeping her into the void, right out of the world as she knew it, as if whirling her off the earth altogether.

It seemed to me we were fighting against the ice, which was all the while coming steadily nearer, covering more of the world with its dead silence, its awful white peace. By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe.

Wenn ein noch so winziger Streich gelang gegen die Allmacht des Feindes, dann war schon alles gelungen.

His few friends and his former teachers might be watched, as well as his brothers and those dearest to him. The entire city, a dragnet. And he was already in it. He had to slip though its meshes. But by now he was really done in.

Butler [Judith Butler] elaborates Foucault's argument about the operations of power and resistance in order to demonstrate the ways in which marginalised identities are complicit with those identificatory regimes they seek to counter

early development of the region's secret police. Through both reading and conversations, I sought to understand how ordinary people learned to cope with the new regimes; how they collaborated, willingly or reluctantly; how and why they joined the party and other state institutions; how they resisted, actively or passively; how they came to make terrible choices that most of us in the West, nowadays, never have to face.

But in every country occupied by the Red Army, the definition of 'fascist' eventually grew broader, expanding to include not only Nazi collaborators but anybody whom the Soviet occupiers and their local allies disliked. In time, the word 'fascist,' in true Orwellian fashion, was eventually used to describe antifascists who also happened to be anticommunists. And every time the definition was expanded, arrests followed. p.86

Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to the face of Imperialist warmongers.

Anne Applebaum

Simon didn't think Meg really wanted to know how to eviscerate a rabbit. He could be wrong about that, but he just couldn't picture Meg pouncing on a bunny and ripping it open with her teeth. Maybe if he tried harder to picture it?

You couldn't help someone who didn't want help. That was a hard, and bitter, life lesson.

The lesson was not lost on Kartane. To be Ringed was the severest form of control. If Daemon couldn't stand the pain, how could he? It became very important not to give Dorothea a reason to Ring him. That night, after Daemon had been allowed to rest a little, he was ordered to serve the witch he'd earlier refused. That night was the first time Daemon went cold.

Victory implies a fight, and there is nothing to be gained by fighting with us. The humans can't win.

Satan, that great angler, hath his sundry baits for sundry tempers of men, which they all catch greedily at, but few perceive the hook till it be too late.

The red world And corresponding red breezes Went on Geryon did not

Campaign Against Akhmatova Begins (1922) She ran from lamppost to lamppost, the wind slammed. Trotsky reviewed her in Pravda: One reads with dismay... and an unofficial Communist Party resolution banned her poetry (1925). She didn't notice, didn't know what a Communist Party was in those days. Fog choked the city. Russia's great poets were all about 35 years ol Scraggly trees wandered by the canal in dim sun.

What are you afraid of? The more I struggled and resisted, the stronger the ghost echoes grew and the more a possibility took shape in my mind just as the patio took shape beneath my hands. The saints were ordinary people. You do paint saints. Wherever I went these words of Father Gervase's stayed with me, a ghost staking out territory in my head as certainly as I had staked out the space for the bricks I now

People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn't stop you from having your own opinion.

People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn't stop you from having your own opinion.

the staff, which once welcomed foreign funders and reporters with open arms, is now no longer willing to meet.

Stop resisting Him. Stop resenting Him. Stop complaining. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Stop demanding what you want. Stop focusing on the outer wrappings of yourself and your circumstances. Adjust your attitude. Change your mind about things — about yourself— about others — about Him. Relax in total trust. He knows what He's doing. Unwrap the package! Let go, and look up! Let Him open the eyes of your heart. OPEN YOUR EYES!

That women talked back in a time when they were increasingly expected to be submissive is a point to which we shall return.