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Golda Meir

Golda Meir (born Golda Mabovitz (גולדה מאיר 3 May 1898 – 8 December 1978) was an Israeli politician and one of the founders of the State of Israel. She served as Minister of Labor, Foreign Minister, and as the fourth Prime Minister of Israel. She is the only woman to have served as a Prime Minister of Israel.

Born in Kiev in the Russian Empire to Jewish parents, Meir immigrated as a child with her family to the United States in 1906.

Quotes

 * It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II]'.
 * As acting head of the Jewish Agency Political Department visited Arab Haifa and reported to the Jewish Agency Executive (6 May 1948); as quoted in The birth of the Palestinian Refuge problem revisited by Benny Morris, p. 309–10 (2nd edition, 2004), citing Protocol of meeting of JAE (6 May 1948), CZA 45/2

 * My delegation cannot refrain from speaking on this question — we who have such an intimate knowledge of boxcars and of deportations to unknown destinations that we cannot be silent.
 * Is it really asking too much for a people to want to decide its own fate; to demand that it alone shall choose flow and by whom it shall be governed; that its young people if they rise against what they believe is wrong shall not be deported from their home and country?
 * It is the tragedy of our generation, that small nations have not yet gained the security of exercising their natural right—namely that of being masters of their own destiny.
 * On the Soviet invasion of Hungary to the UN General Assembly (21 November 1956), as cited in "Excerpts from the U.N. General Assembly Debate on Soviet Action in Hungary", The New York Times (21 November 1956), p. 10

 * Any one who speaks in favor of bringing the Arab refugees back must also say how he expects to take the responsibility for it, if he is interested in the state of Israel. It is better that things are stated clearly and plainly: We shall not let this happen.
 * Speech to the Knesset, reported in Ner (October 1961)

 * There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.
 * As quoted in Sunday Times (15 June 1969), also in The Washington Post (16 June 1969)

 * We don’t thrive on military acts. We do them because we have to, and thank God we are efficient.
 * Vogue (July 1969)

 * We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon — no alternative. The Egyptians could run to Egypt, the Syrians into Syria. The only place we could run was into the sea, and before we did that we might as well fight.
 * As quoted in LIFE magazine (3 October 1969), p. 32

 * It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don't want victories anymore.
 * As quoted in LIFE magazine (3 October 1969), p. 32

 * When were Palestinians born? What was all of this area before the First World War when Britain got the Mandate over Palestine? What was Palestine, then? Palestine was then the area between the Mediterranean and the Iraqian border. Eastern West Bank was Palestine. I am a Palestinian, from 1921 to 1948, I carried a Palestinian passport. There was no such thing in this area as Jews, and Arabs, and Palestinians, There were Jews and Arabs.
 * "Iron Lady of Israeli politics" Thames TV (1970)

 * I have given instructions that I be informed every time one of our soldiers is killed, even if it is in the middle of the night. When President Nasser leaves instructions that he is to be awakened in the middle of the night if an Egyptian soldier is killed, there will be peace.

 * [The Soviet government] is the most realistic regime in the world — no ideals.

 * If we have to have a choice between dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we'd rather be alive and have the bad image.
 * As quoted in As Good as Golda : The Warmth and Wisdom of Israel's Prime Minister (1970) edited by Israel Shenker and Mary Shenker, p. 26

 * We owe a responsibility not only to those who are in Israel but also to those generations that are no more, to those millions who have died within our lifetime, to Jews all over the world, and to generations of Jews to come. We hate war. We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown, and when strawberries bloom in Israel.
 * As quoted in As Good as Golda : The Warmth and Wisdom of Israel's Prime Minister (1970) edited by Israel Shenker and Mary Shenker, p. 28

 * When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.
 * Press conference in London (1969), as quoted in A Land of Our Own : An Oral Autobiography (1973) edited by Marie Syrkin, p. 242

 * This country exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy.
 * As quoted in Le Monde (15 October 1971)

 * Women’s Liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It’s the men who are discriminated against. They can’t bear children. And no one’s likely to do anything about that.
 * As quoted in Newsweek (23 October 1972)

 * Arab sovereignty in Jerusalem just cannot be. This city will not be divided — not half and half, not 60-40, not 75-25, nothing.
 * Time (19 February 1973)

 * Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!
 * At a dinner honoring West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, as reported in The New York Times (11 June 1973, p. 3)
 * Unsourced variants: Moses dragged us for 40 years through the desert to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil. Moses dragged us through the desert for 40 years to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil.

 * In Israel, we read from right to left.
 * To Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State, who had written her that he considers himself 'an American first, Secretary of State second, and a Jew third'

 * To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.
 * When questioned on Israel's future, in The New York Times (12 December 1974)

 * Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.
 * The Observer (29 December 1974)

 * It is not only a matter, I believe, of religious observance and practice. To me, being Jewish means and has always meant being proud to be part of a people that has maintained its distinct identity for more than 2,000 years, with all the pain and torment that has been inflicted upon it.
 * My Life (1975), p. 459

 * I am also grateful that I live in a country whose people have learned how to go on living in a sea of hatred without hating those who want to destroy them and without abandoning their own vision of peace. To have learned this is a great art, the prescription for which is not written down anywhere. It is part of our way of life in Israel. Finally, I wish to say that from the time I came to Palestine as a young woman, we have been forced to choose between what is more dangerous and what is less dangerous for us. At times we have all been tempted to give in to various pressures and to accept proposals that might guarantee us a little quiet for a few months, or maybe even for a few years, but that could only lead us eventually into even greater peril.
 * My Life (1975), p. 459

 * One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
 * My Life (1975), p. 231

 * I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like détente when there’s a good English phrase for it — cold war.
 * As quoted in Newsweek (19 January 1976)

 * What do you gain, Soviet Union, from this miserable policy? Where is your decency? Would it be a disgrace for you to give up this battle?
 * On the suppression of freedom of Jews in the USSR to the World Conference on Soviet Jewry, Brussels, in The New York Times (20 February 1976)

 * Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.
 * On 30th anniversary of the founding of Israel, in International Herald Tribune (11 May 1978)

 * A story once went the rounds of Israel to the effect that Ben-Gurion described me as 'the only man' in his cabinet. What amused me about is that he (or whoever invented the story) thought that this was the greatest compliment that could be paid to a woman. I very much doubt that any man would have been flattered if I had said about him that he was the only woman in the government!

 * Whether Women are better than men, I can say they are certainly no worse.
 * Golda Meir Quotes. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved July 7, 2022.

Fallaci interview (1973)

 * Interview with Oriana Fallaci published in Ms. magazine (April 1973)

 * It’s no accident many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head. Well, what if I do? . . . Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.

 * I thought that a Jewish state would be free of the evils afflicting other societies: theft, murder, prostitution... But now we have them all. And that’s a thing that cuts to the heart ...

 * How can I explain the difference to me between America and Russia?... the America I’ve known is a place where men on horseback escort union marchers, the Russia I’ve known is a place where men on horseback slaughter young Socialists and Jews.

 * From Russia I didn’t bring out a single happy memory, only sad, tragic ones. The nightmare of pogroms, the brutality of Cossacks charging young Socialists, fear, shrieks of terror ...

 * America is a great country. It has many shortcomings, many social inequalities, and it’s tragic that the problem of the blacks wasn’t solved fifty or even a hundred years ago, but it’s still a great country, a country full of opportunities, of freedom! Does it seem nothing to you to be able to say what you like, even against the government, the Establishment?

 * Those nuts that burn their bras and walk around all disheveled and hate men? They’re crazy. Crazy.

 * I'm a slave to this leaf in a diary that lists what I must do, what I must say, every half hour.

 * I want to see a film, they send the Israeli army reserves to escort me! What kind of life is this?

 * Fashion is an imposition, a rein on freedom.

 * What person with any sense likes himself? I know myself too well to like myself.

 * I prefer to stay alive and be criticized than be sympathized.

Disputed

 * When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.
 * as quoted in A Land of Our Own : An Oral Autobiography (1973) edited by Marie Syrkin, p. 242
 * Harvey Rachlin was unable to find a primary source for this quote and the one below The Jewish Press - The Mystery of Golda's Golden Gems
 * Variants:
 * Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.
 * as quoted in A Land of Our Own : An Oral Autobiography (1973) edited by Marie Syrkin, p. 242
 * Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.
 * As quoted in Media Bias and the Middle East (2003) by Paul Carlson, p. 10
 * Peace will come when the Arabs start to love their children more than they hate us.
 * As quoted in The Agony of the Promised Land (2004) by Joshua Levy, Ch. 23 "The Hope for Peace", p. 187
 * We can forgive [them] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them from forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [them] when they love their children more than they hate us.
 * As attributed in an advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter from the Anti-Defamation League.

Quotes about Meir

 * When Golda Meir's speech at Brandeis in June 1973 was disrupted by picketers holding signs that said, "Gramma, how many babies did you kill today?" Diane Balser protested. Her family adored Golda Meir-and, further, "this was Brandeis," where Balser was then enrolled as a Ph.D. student in sociology. Regardless of her disagreement with the Israeli prime minister's policies, Balser saw the placards as "anti-Semitic and as misogynistic attacks on a Jewish woman."
 * Joyce Antler Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (2020)

 * In 1973, she (Betty Friedan) returned from a visit to Israel disappointed that Prime Minister Golda Meir refused to meet with her, viewing her as an "American witch of women's liberation who might possibly infect Israeli women."
 * Joyce Antler Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (2020)

 * By that time it was already clear that the next prime minster was going to be Golda Meir, a woman whom I frankly detested – a mutual sentiment, I might add. I knew her as an opinionated, obstinate person, primitive in her outlook, rigid in her attitudes, with a genius for reaching and exploiting the deepest fears and prejudices of the Jewish masses.  I was certain that with her as prime minister, all peace efforts would come to a total standstill.
 * Uri Avnery My Friend, the Enemy (1986) – page 80

 * Golda is the best man in my Cabinet.
 * David Ben-Gurion, quoted in Terry Morris, Shalom Golda (1971), p. 138

 * he (Shimon Peres) maintains an ongoing dialogue with the intellectual community. Now that is real change from, say, Menachem Begin-not to mention Golda Meir!
 * Shulamith Hareven 1985 interview in We Are All Close: Conversations with Israeli Writers by Haim Chertok (1989)

 * We must understand that there was no "Jewish justice," as Golda Meir said in one of her less sterling moments, nor was there "Arab justice," a claim that also has proponents; rather, there were two deep traumas, on which a completely new life, a different world, new hope must be built.
 * Shulamith Hareven "No One Asked the Medics" in The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)

 * Golda Meir relates in her memoirs that when she arrived at the newly established Kibbutz Merhavia, she found the members eating what she called "terrible food": vegetables that "weren't even cooked" in "some awful green oil," spicy olives "that are bad for you, as everyone knows." She took over with a firm hand, and from the day she entered the kitchen she "forced" (as she put it) her companions to desist from their wayward "native" habits, and to start their day with good, hot, cooked mush. Their feeble protests were soon stilled, and they adapted. No wonder it was Golda who later declared that there was no such thing as a Palestinian (by her lights, there wasn't) and that the palm of her hand would sprout hair if Anwar Sadat really came to Jerusalem.
 * Shulamith Hareven "On Being a Levantine" in The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)

 * Rita Giacoman mentions in passing that she returned from the U.S. to teach public health at Birzeit University in 1969, when Golda Meir announced that there was no such thing as a Palestinian. "So I had to come home," she says, matter of factly, "in defiance of Golda Meir-and today no one dares say it."
 * Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz "I've been to Israel and Palestine" in The Issue is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance (1992)

 * Golda Meir was asked that question: "We hear you don't mind getting older?" And she said, "That's true, but I never said it was a pleasure."
 * 1995 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)

title: Golda Meir


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Ovadia Yosef

Ovadia Yosef (Hebrew: עובדיה יוסף Ovadya Yosef, Arabic: عبد الله يوسف, translit. Abdullah Yusuf; September 24, 1920 – October 7, 2013) was an Iraqi-born Talmudic scholar, a posek, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1973 to 1983, and the founder and long-time spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-Orthodox Shas party. Yosef's responsa were highly regarded within Haredi circles, particularly among Mizrahi communities, among whom he was regarded as "the most important living halakhic authority".

Quotes

 * It is easy for a rabbi to establish prohibitions, but a rabbi's real strength is to teach Torah and rule on law with an emphasis on what is permitted.
 * Quoted in Jewish Chronicle, 11 Oct 2013 page 22.

 * Saving a life overrides territories.
 * Sentence according to Jewish law, 1979
 * Hebrew source.

 * It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable. […] The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world.
 * Undated sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs; a Shas spokesman stated Yosef only meant "Arab murderers and terrorists"

 * There was a tsunami and there are terrible natural disasters, all of this because of too little Torah study. Where there is Torah it sustains the world. There are negros there [in New Orleans]. Negros will study Torah? Let's bring them a tsunami, drown them. Hundreds of thousands were left without a shelter. Tens of thousands died. All of this is because they have no God.
 * Regarding Hurricane Katrina, September 6, 2005
 * Hebrew source
 * Hebrew source

 * A Druze soldier who stood guard to protect Israel against vengeful enemies, and was killed by Ishmaelites - it is proper to say a 'hashkava' [prayer] in synagogue for the benefit of his soul... The Druze believe in one God and are not idolaters at all, and also believe in the persistence of the soul [after death], and all the more so they enlist in the IDF and sacrifice themselves to protect the inhabitants of the State of Israel, and they keep the Seven Mitzvot of the Children of Noah, and their status is as Righteous of the Nations of the World.

2001

 * It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.
 * 5 December 2004 article on New York Times

2010

 * “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel,”.
 * Why are Gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why Gentiles were created.
 * 18 October 2010 article on Jerusalem Post (From remarks of Ovadia Yosef weekly Saturday night sermon on the laws regarding the actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on Shabbat)

 * In Israel, death has no dominion over them...With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but (God) will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one's donkey would die, they'd lose their money. This is his servant...That's why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew. Gentiles were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel.
 * 20 Octoboer 2010 on Haaretz

Jewish law

 * They don't observe the Sabbath, they don't observe the Torah, they don't pray, they don't put on phylacteries every day. Is it any wonder that they're killed? It's no wonder. May the Almighty have mercy on them and bring them back to religion.

About Ovadia Yosef

 * The most significant halachic authority of the last 100 years, whose positions helped fashion a balanced and moderate Judaism.
 * Obituary Jewish Chronicle, 11 Oct 2013 page 33.

title: Ovadia Yosef


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Carol Moseley Braun

Carol Moseley Braun (born 16 August 1947) is a former U.S. Senator, an American diplomat, politician, and lawyer who represented Illinois in the United States Senate from 1993 to 1999. Prior to her Senate tenure, Moseley Braun was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives from 1979 to 1988 and served as Cook County Recorder of Deeds from 1988 to 1992.

Quotes

 * The Islamic community today is faced with a new version of an old struggle. My late mother used to say it doesn't matter whether you came to this country on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, through Ellis Island or the Rio Grande. We're all in the same boat now.
 * 40th Cconvention of the Islamic Society of North America Speech, (September 6, 2004)

 * Ketanji Brown Jackson questioning appealing to the worst instincts of the American people
 * Moseley Braun: Ketanji Brown Jackson questioning ‘appealing to the worst instincts of the American people’ (March 25, 2022)

 * There’s a word, and the word is called misogynoir. And that word describes the double whammy that women of color have to face: You’re vulnerable on the issue of gender, and you’re vulnerable on the issue of race.
 * The US’s first Black woman senator on what Ketanji Brown Jackson brings to the Supreme Court (April 7, 2022)

title: Carol Moseley Braun


text:
Judith Butler

Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of, queer theory, and literary theory.

Quotes

 * There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.
 * "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" (1990)

 * If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.
 * "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity" (1990)

 * Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.
 * "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Inside/Out (1991) edited by Diana Fuss

 * Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
 * Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)

 * Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
 * "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary" (1993), later published in The Judith Butler Reader (2004) edited by Sarah Salih with Judith Butler

 * The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
 * "Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time" (1997), which received first place in the Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest

 * There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said “we should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge.” It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability.
 * Interview with Judith Butler. in: The Believer. May 2003

 * Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.

 * I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men.
 * "As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up" in Haaretz. February 24, 2010

Introduction

 * When the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out.
 * p. 10

 * Lives matter in the sense that they assume physical form within the sphere of appearance; lives matter because they are to be valued equally.
 * p. 12

 * Violence as a tool is already operating in the world before anyone takes it up: that fact alone neither justifies nor discounts the use of the tool. What seems most important, however, is that the tool is already part of a practice, presupposing a world conducive to its use; that the use of the tool builds or rebuilds a specific kind of world, activating a sedimented legacy of use. When any of us commit acts of violence, we are, in and through those acts, building a more violent world.
 * p. 19

 * Quite apart from assiduous efforts to restrict the use of violence as means rather than an end, the actualization of violence as a means can inadvertently become its own end, producing new violence, producing violence anew, reiterating the license, and licensing further violence. Violence does not exhaust itself in the realization of a just end; rather, it renews itself in directions that exceed both deliberate intention and instrumental schemes. In other words, by acting as if the use of violence can be a means to achieve a nonviolent end, one imagines that the practice of violence does not in the act posit violence as its own end. The technē is undermined by the praxis, and the use of violence only makes the world into a more violent place, by bringing more violence into the world.
 * p. 20

 * Nonviolence has now to be understood less as a moral position adopted by individuals in relation to a field of possible action than as a social and political practice undertaken in concert, culminating in a form of resistance to systemic forms of destruction coupled with a commitment to world building that honors global interdependency of the kind that embodies ideals of economic, social, and political freedom and equality.
 * p. 20

 * Nonviolence does not necessarily emerge from a pacific or calm part of the soul. Very often it is an expression of rage, indignation, and aggression.
 * p. 21

 * Nonviolent forms of resistance can and must be aggressively pursued. A practice of aggressive nonviolence is, therefore, not a contradiction in terms. Mahatma Gandhi insisted that , or “soul force,” his name for a practice and politics of nonviolence, is a nonviolent force, one that consists at once of an “insistence on truth … that arms the votary with matchless power.” To understand this force or strength, there can be no simple reduction to physical strength. At the same time, “soul force” takes an embodied form. The practice of “going limp” before political power is, on the one hand, a passive posture, and is thought to belong to the tradition of passive resistance; at the same time, it is a deliberate way of exposing the body to police power, of entering the field of violence, and of exercising an adamant and embodied form of political agency. It requires suffering, yes, but for the purposes of transforming both oneself and social reality.
 * pp. 21-22

 * Nonviolence is an ideal that cannot always be fully honored in the practice. To the degree that those who practice nonviolent resistance put their body in the way of an external power, they make physical contact, presenting a force against force in the process. Nonviolence does not imply the absence of force or of aggression. It is, as it were, an ethical stylization of embodiment, replete with gestures and modes of non-action, ways of becoming an obstacle, of using the solidity of the body and its proprioceptive object field to block or derail a further exercise of violence.
 * p. 22

 * There is no practice of nonviolence that does not negotiate fundamental ethical and political ambiguities, which means that “nonviolence” is not an absolute principle, but the name of an ongoing struggle.
 * p. 23

 * Nonviolence is less a failure of action than a physical assertion of the claims of life, a living assertion, a claim that is made by speech, gesture, and action, through networks, encampments, and assemblies; all of these seek to recast the living as worthy of value, as potentially grievable, precisely under conditions in which they are either erased from view or cast into irreversible forms of precarity. When the precarious expose their living status to those powers that threaten their very lives, they engage a form of persistence that holds the potential to defeat one of the guiding aims of violent power—namely, to cast those on the margins as dispensable, to push them beyond the margins into the zone of non-being, to use Fanon’s phrase. When nonviolent movements work within the ideals of, it is the equal claim to a livable and grievable life that serves as a guiding social ideal, one that is fundamental to an ethics and politics of nonviolence that moves beyond the legacy of individualism. It opens up a new consideration of social freedom as defined in part by our constitutive interdependency. An egalitarian imaginary is required for such a struggle—one that reckons with the potential for destruction in every living bond. Violence against the other is, in this sense, violence against oneself, something that becomes clear when we recognize that violence assaults the living interdependency that is, or should be, our social world.
 * pp. 24-25

Chapter One

 * Nonviolence is perhaps best described as a practice of resistance that becomes possible, if not mandatory, precisely at the moment when doing violence seems most justified and obvious. In this way, it can be understood as a practice that not only stops a violent act, or a violent process, but requires a form of sustained action, sometimes aggressively pursued. So, one suggestion I will make is that we can think of nonviolence not simply as the absence of violence, or as the act of refraining from committing violence, but as a sustained commitment, even a way of rerouting aggression for the purposes of affirming ideals of equality and freedom.
 * p. 27

 * Nonviolence does not make sense without a commitment to equality. The reason why nonviolence requires a commitment to equality can best be understood by considering that in this world some lives are more clearly valued than others, and that this inequality implies that certain lives will be more tenaciously defended than others. If one opposes the violence done to human lives—or, indeed, to other living beings—this presumes that it is because those lives are valuable. Our opposition affirms those lives as valuable. If they were to be lost as a result of violence, that loss would be registered as a loss only because those lives were affirmed as having a living value, and that, in turn, means we regard those lives as worthy of grief.
 * p. 28

 * If nonviolence is to make sense as an ethical and political position, it cannot simply repress aggression or do away with its reality; rather, nonviolence emerges as a meaningful concept precisely when destruction is most likely or seems most certain.
 * p. 39

 * When the world fails us, when we ourselves become worldless in the social sense, the body suffers and shows its precarity; that mode of demonstrating precarity is itself, or carries with it, a political demand and even an expression of outrage. To be a body differentially exposed to harm or to death is precisely to exhibit a form of precarity, but also to suffer a form of inequality that is unjust. So, the situation of many populations who are increasingly subject to unlivable precarity raises for us the question of global obligations. If we ask why any of us should care about those who suffer at a distance from us, the answer is not to be found in paternalistic justifications, but in the fact that we inhabit the world together in relations of interdependency. Our fates are, as it were, given over to one another.
 * p. 50

 * Nonviolence is not an absolute principle, but an open-ended struggle with violence and its countervailing forces.
 * p. 56

 * One might expect that a consideration of grievability pertains only to those who are dead, but my contention is that grievability is already operative in life, and that it is a characteristic attributed to living creatures, marking their value within a differential scheme of values and bearing directly on the question of whether or not they are treated equally and in a just way. To be grievable is to be interpellated in such a way that you know your life matters; that the loss of your life would matter; that your body is treated as one that should be able to live and thrive, whose precarity should be minimized, for which provisions for flourishing should be available. The presumption of equal grievability would be not only a conviction or attitude with which another person greets you, but a principle that organizes the social organization of health, food, shelter, employment, sexual life, and civic life.
 * p. 59

 * One reason an egalitarian approach to the value of life is important is that it draws from ideals of radical democracy at the same time that it enters into ethical considerations about how best to practice nonviolence. The institutional life of violence will not be brought down by a prohibition, but only by a counter-institutional ethos and practice.
 * p. 61

 * The ethical stand of nonviolence has to be linked to a commitment to radical equality. And more specifically, the practice of nonviolence requires an opposition to biopolitical forms of racism and war logics that regularly distinguish lives worth safeguarding from those that are not—populations conceived as collateral damage, or as obstructions to policy and military aims.
 * p. 62

 * The ethical and political practice of nonviolence can rely neither exclusively on the dyadic encounter, nor on the bolstering of a prohibition; it requires a political opposition to the biopolitical forms of racism and war logics that rely on phantasmagoric inversions that occlude the binding and interdependent character of the social bond. It requires, as well, an account of why, and under what conditions, the frameworks for understanding violence and nonviolence, or violence and self-defense, seem to invert into one another, causing confusion about how best to pin down those terms.
 * p. 62

 * The state monopolizes violence by calling its critics “violent”. [...] Hence, we should be wary about those who claim that violence is necessary to curb or check violence; those who praise the forces of law, including the police and the prisons, as the final arbiters. To oppose violence is to understand that violence does not always take the form of the blow.
 * p. 63

 * We must fight those who are committed to destruction, without replicating their destructiveness. Understanding how to fight in this way is the task and the bind of a nonviolent ethics and politics.
 * p. 64

 * We do not have to love one another to be obligated to build a world in which all lives are sustainable. The right to persist can only be understood as a social right, as the subjective instance of a social and global obligation we bear toward one another.
 * p. 64

 * To subdue destruction is one of the most important affirmations of which we are capable in this world. It is the affirmation of this life, bound up with yours, and with the realm of the living: an affirmation caught up with a potential for destruction and its countervailing force.
 * p. 65

Chapter Two

 * To say that a life is grievable is to claim that a life, even before it is lost, is, or will be, worthy of being grieved on the occasion of its loss; the life has value in relation to mortality. One treats a person differently if one brings the sense of the grievability of the other to one’s ethical bearing toward the other. If an other’s loss would register as a loss, would be marked and mourned, and if the prospect of loss is feared, and precautions are thus taken to safeguard that life from harm or destruction, then our very ability to value and safeguard a life depends upon an ongoing sense of its grievability—the conjectured future of a life as an indefinite potential that would be mourned were it cut short or lost.
 * p. 75

 * For consequentialists, of course, the imperative to imagine the consequences of living in a world in which everyone would act as you choose to act leads to the conclusion that some practices are utterly untenable, not because they are irrational, but because they inflict consequential damage that is unwanted. In both cases, I would suggest, a potential action is figured as hypothetically reciprocal: one’s own act comes back in the imagined form of another’s act; another might act on me as I would act on the other, and the consequences are unacceptable because of those damaging consequences.
 * p. 78

 * Guilt has to be understood not only as a way of checking one’s own destructiveness, but as a mechanism for safeguarding the life of the other, one that emerges from our own need and dependency, from a sense that this life is not a life without another life. Indeed, when it turns into a safeguarding action, I am not sure it should still be called “guilt.” If we do still use that term, we could conclude that “guilt” is strangely generative or that its productive form is reparation.
 * p. 93

 * Preserving seeks to secure the life that already is; safeguarding secures and reproduces the conditions of becoming, of living, of futurity, where the content of that life, that living, can be neither prescribed nor predicted, and where self-determination emerges as a potential.
 * p. 94

Chapter Three

 * We are not yet speaking about equality if we have not yet spoken about equal grievability, or the equal attribution of grievability. Grievability is a defining feature of equality. Those whose grievability is not assumed are those who suffer inequality—unequal value.
 * p. 108

 * To affirm equality is to affirm a cohabitation defined in part by an interdependency that takes the edge off the individual boundaries of the body, or that works that edge for its social and political potential.
 * p. 148

 * It is precisely because we can destroy that we are under an obligation to know why we ought not to do it, and to summon those countervailing powers that curb our destructive capacity. Nonviolence becomes an ethical obligation by which we are bound precisely because we are bound to one another; it may well be an obligation against which we rail, in which ambivalent swings of the psyche make themselves known, but the obligation to preserve the social bond can be resolved upon without precisely resolving that ambivalence. The obligation not to destroy each other emerges from, and reflects, the vexed social form of our lives, and it leads us to reconsider whether self-preservation is not linked to preserving the lives of others.
 * p. 148

Chapter Four

 * Although it is commonly supposed that war making is the specific activity of nations, the blind rage that motivates war destroys the very social bonds that make nations possible. Of course, it can fortify the nationalism of a nation, producing a provisional coherence bolstered by war and enmity, but it also erodes the social relations that make politics possible. The power of destruction unleashed by war breaks social ties and produces anger, revenge, and distrust (“embitterment”) such that it becomes unclear whether reparation is possible, undermining not only those relations that may have been built in the past, but also the future possibility of peaceful coexistence.
 * p. 154

 * Whatever the explicit strategic or political aims of a war may be, they prove to be weak in comparison with its aims of destruction; what war destroys first are the very restrictions imposed on destructive license. If we can rightly speak about the unstated “aim” of war, it is neither primarily to alter the political landscape nor to establish a new political order, but rather to destroy the social basis of politics itself.
 * p. 154

Quotes about Judith Butler

 * Arguing that feminists could no longer seek recourse to an unproblematized women's "experience," Judith Butler has proposed reconceiving the category of women as "permanently open, permanently contested, permanently contingent, in order not to foreclose in advance future claims for inclusion." In a similar vein, it is my contention that "Latino," like the category "women," should be reconceived as a site of permanent political contestation.
 * Cristina Beltrán The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (2010)

title: Judith Butler


text:
Queer

Queer is an umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities who are not heterosexual or are not cisgender. Originally meaning "strange" or "peculiar", queer came to be used pejoratively against those with same-sex desires or relationships in the late 19th century. Beginning in the late 1980s, queer activists, such as the members of Queer Nation, began to reclaim the word as a deliberately provocative and politically radical alternative to the more assimilationist branches of the LGBT community.

Quotes

 * while Michael Warner (1993) defines queer as "resistance to regimes of the normal."
 * Warner, Michael (1993). "Introduction", Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, p. xxvii. Ed. Michael Warner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 * Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1995) suggest that participation in "queer publics," is, "more a matter of aspiration than it is the expression of an identity or a history,"
 * Berlant, Lauren and Warner, Michael (May 1995). "What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?" PMLA 110:3:343.

 * "Queerness...[is] more a posture of opposition than a simple statement about sexuality. It [is] about principles, not particularities. 'To me,' explained [Queer Nation/San Francisco activist Karl] Knapper, 'queerness is about acknowledging and celebrating difference, embracing wha sets you apart. A straight person can't be gay, but a straight person can be queer."
 * L.A. Kauffman (1992). "Radical Change: The Left Attacks Identity Politics", Village Voice 30 June, 20.

 * "[There are] cases of straight queerness, and of other forms of queerness that might not be contained within existing categories or have reference to only one established category...new queer spaces open up (or are revealed) whenever someone moves away from using only one specific sexual identity category--gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight--to understand and to describe mass culture, and recognizes that texts and people's responses to them are more sexually transmutable than any one category could signify--excepting, perhaps, that of 'queer.'"
 * Alexander Doty (1993). Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture, p. xvii-xix. Minneapolis: University of Minneasota Press.

 * "The preference for 'queer' represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalizations; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. For academics, being interested in queer theory is a way to mess up the desexualized spaces of the academy, exude some rut, reimaging the public from and for which academic intellectuals write, dress, and perform....For both academics and activists, 'queer' gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual....The insistence on 'queer'...has the effect of pointing out a wide field of normalization, rather than simple intolerance, as the site of violence."
 * Warner, Michael (1993). "Introduction", Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, p. xxvi. Ed. Michael Warner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 * "Queer" involves "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning [that occur] when the consituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signifying monolithically... [including] drags, clones, leatherfolk...fantasists...feminist men...masturbators...people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such." She praises, "work around 'queer' [which] spins the term outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all." However, queer must denote "almost simply, same-sex sexual object choice, lesbian or gay...given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term's definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possiblity of queerness itself."
 * Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993). Tendencies, p. 8. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

 * Queer has become "the discursive rallying point for younger lesbians and gay men and, in yet other contexts, for lesbian interventions and, in yet other contexts, for bisexuals and straights for whom the term expresses an affiliation with antihomophobic politics. That it can become such a discursive site whose uses are not fully constrained in advance ought to be safe-guarded not only for the purposes of continuing to democratize queer politics, but also to expose, affirm, and rework the specific historicity of the term."
 * Judith Butler (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", p. 230. New York: Routledge.

 * "'Queer' derives its force precisely through the repeated invocation by which it has become linked to accusation, pathologization, insult. This is an invocation by which a social bond among homophobic communities is formed through time. The interpellation echoes past interpellations, and binds the speakers, as if they spoke in unison across time. In this sense, it is always an imaginary chorus that taunts 'queer'".
 * Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", p. 226. New York: Routledge.

 * As the essence of queer, I think of Tim Dean's work on being queer and queer not as being about who you're having sex with—that can be a dimension of it—but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.
 * bell hooks, Peake, Amber (December 16, 2021). "'Queer-pas-gay' identity meaning explored as bell hooks dies aged 69". TheFocus.

Source

 * Thomas, Calvin, ed. (2000). "Introduction: Identification, Appropriation, Proliferation", Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252068130.

title: Queer