Respectability Politics Quotes & Sayings

It is not for you to say - you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering - it is not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation. The iron that has entered into our souls has gone too deep for you to find it. Leave the refugee alone! Laugh at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at the secret self which smolders in him, sometimes under the every-day respectability and tranquility of a man like me - sometimes under the grinding poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am - but judge us not. In the time of your first Charles you might have done us justice - the long luxury of your freedom has made you incapable of doing us justice now. — Wilkie Collins

Zillah Eisenstein uses the term 'decoy' to describe the way in which 'imperialist democracy' covers over its structural sins with a thin veneer of representational respectability: 'The manipulation of race and gender as decoys for democracy reveals the corruptibility of identity politics.'4 Getting women and ethnic minorities into positions of power is not necessarily going to improve the lives of women and ethnic minorities in general, and certainly hasn't so far. — Nina Power

If the emperor had capriciously decreed the death of the most eminent and virtuous citizen of the republic, the cruel order would have been executed without hesitation by the ministers of open violence or of specious injustice. The caution, the delay, the difficulty with which he proceeded in the condemnation and punishment of a popular bishop, discovered to the world that the privileges of the church had already revived a sense of order and freedom in the Roman government. — Edward Gibbon

I quit after a bad car accident. The thing about boxing is that you can be a star for five or six years, but when you go back to the old life, it's tough. — Olivier Martinez

For true Magick means "to employ one set of natural forces at a mechanical advantage as against another set" - I quote, as closely as memory serves, Thomas Henry Huxley, when he explains that when he lifts his water-jug - or his elbow - he does not "defy the Law of Gravitation." On the contrary, he uses that Law; its equations form part of the system by which he lifts the jug without spilling the water. — Aleister Crowley

Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.

Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.
Say autumn despite the green
in your eyes. Beauty despite
daylight. Say you'd kill for it. Unbreakable dawn
mounting in your throat.
My thrashing beneath you
like a sparrow stunned
with falling. — Ocean Vuong

Politics preys on people's naivety — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Especially for those of us living in the Western culture, death to a large extent is still a taboo subject. It's considered something dreadful that shouldn't be happening. It's usually denied. The fact of death is not faced. What we don't realize in Western culture is that death has a redemptive dimension. — Eckhart Tolle

If negative auric vibrations are not kept to a minimum by using psychic shielding techniques, and if they aren't cleansed from our subtle body through meditation, they will accumulate and eventually become very toxic. — Frederick Lenz

The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt. — Ayn Rand

There's a similarity in both being young people who are not about the politics of respectability. — Stanley Nelson Jr.

Most monuments are not something you're going to keep me out of. And I go to a lot of monuments. — Rob Huebel

Often, my central challenge is figuring out how do I build trust, how do I acquaint people who've just endured some terrible event - losing their child to murder, say, or being sexually assaulted - with the bizarre and sometimes invasive nature of in-depth interviews that aren't just a quick list of ten questions? — Sarah Stillman