Arundhati Roy Quotes About Wealth
-
Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India's richest people and redistribute it amongst 2 million of India's poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development?
→ -
As a writer, I've often said that, among the other things that we need to reclaim, other than the obscene wealth of billionaires, is language. Language has been deployed to mean the exact opposite of what it really means when they talk about democracy or freedom.
→ -
We often confuse or loosely use the ideas of crony capitalism or neoliberalism to actually avoid using the word "capitalism", but once you've actually seen, let's say, what's happening in India and the United States - that this model of US economics packaged in a carton that says "democracy" is being forced on countries all over the world, militarily if necessary, has in the United States itself resulted in 400 of the richest people owning wealth equivalent [to that] of half of the population.
→ -
The whole privatisation of health and education, of natural resources and essential infrastructure - all of this is so twisted and so antithetical to anything that would place the interests of human beings or the environment at the center of what ought to be a government concern - should stop. The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people's wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.
→ -
Every time I say the word capitalism, everyone just assumes I have plenty of Marxism in me, I do. But Russia and China had their bloody revolutions and even while they were Communist, they had the same idea about generating wealth - tear it out of the bowels of the earth. And now they have come out with the same idea in the end... you know, capitalism. But capitalism will fail, too.
→ -
I hope that that the people in the Occupy movement are politically aware enough to know that their being excluded from the obscene amassing of wealth of US corporations is part of the same system of the exclusion and war that is being waged by these corporations in places like India, Africa and the Middle East.
→ -
In India, 100 of the richest people own assets worth 25% of the gross domestic product. There's something terribly wrong. No individual and no corporation should be allowed to amass that kind of unlimited wealth, including bestselling writers like myself, who are showered with royalties.
→
Related Authors
-
Taslima Nasrin Author -
Salman Rushdie Novelist -
Khushwant Singh Novelist -
Tariq Ali Writer -
Howard Zinn Historian -
Anita Desai Novelist -
Aravind Adiga Writer -
Noam Chomsky Linguist -
R.K. Narayan Film writer -
Kiran Desai Author -
Pankaj Mishra Essayist -
Chetan Bhagat Author -
Aruna Roy Political leader -
Ashwin Sanghi Author -
Indira Gandhi Former Prime Minister of India -
Vikram Seth Novelist -
Amitav Ghosh Author -
B. R. Ambedkar Indian Politician -
Rohinton Mistry Writer -
Jhumpa Lahiri Author