“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”
From a speech entitled Come September http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/politics/comeSeptember.pdf, given at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM, 29 Sep 2002.
Speeches
Source: War Talk
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Arundhati Roy 122
Indian novelist, essayist 1961Related quotes
“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.”
Source: Articles, Come September (29 Sep 2002)
White Self-Hate: Master-Stroke Of The Enemy
1962, White Self-Hate: Master-Stroke Of The Enemy
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”
Source: To the Nations of the World, address to Pan-African conference, London (1900). These words are also found in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), ch. II: Of the Dawn of Freedom
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 31
Context: For four hundred years the human race has not made a step but what has left its plain vestige behind. We enter now upon great centuries. The sixteenth century will be known as the age of painters, the seventeenth will be termed the age of writers, the eighteenth the age of philosophers, the nineteenth the age of apostles and prophets. To satisfy the nineteenth century, it is necessary to be the painter of the sixteenth, the writer of the seventeenth, the philosopher of the eighteenth; and it is also necessary, like Louis Blane, to have the innate and holy love of humanity which constitutes an apostolate, and opens up a prophetic vista into the future. In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, animosity will be dead, royalty will be dead, and dogmas will be dead; but Man will live. For all there will be but one country—that country the whole earth; for all there will be but one hope—that hope the whole heaven.
Address to the Workman's Congress at Marseille http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo%27s_Address_to_the_Workman%27s_Congress_at_Marseille (1879)
Interview, live at Coachella http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YMwcXBePqE
Context: I've never really been into flags of any kind, cause flags can bring people together, but they always bring people together against other people, and I don't really consider myself to be a patriot in the sense that I say, 'okay, this is my nation,' I consider myself to be a child of this whole planet.
“Let the dead bury the dead? But, the dead can bury no one.”
2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)