South Africa used to seem so far away. Then it came home to me. It began to signify the meaning of white hatred here. That was wha...t the sheets and the suits and the ties covered up, not very well. That was what the cowardly guys calling me names from their speeding truck wanted to happen to me, to all of me: to my people. That was what would happen to me if I walked around the corner into the wrong neighborhood. That was Birmingham. That was Brooklyn. That was Reagan. That was the end of reason. South Africa was how I came to understand that I am not against war; I am against losing the war.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If Nature here wishes to make a mountain, she runs a range for five hundred miles; if a plain, she levels eighty; if a rock, she t...ilts five thousand feet of strata on end; our skies are higher and more intensely blue; our waves larger than others; our rivers fiercer. There is nothing measured, small nor petty in South Africa.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have a fair amount of faith that women won't sit back and allow South Africa to become a totally male-dominated new society. The... women in South Africa have shown that they are strong, and I think they will make their voices heard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for info...rmation about areas of life we don't know--Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel--the quality of philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The bad news for animals is twofold. First, in all of these cases--women's rights, the abolition of slavery, ending apartheid--a g...ood part of the political momentum comes from the oppressed themselves. Progress in South Africa never would have begun if blacks there hadn't perceived their own dignity and fought for it. Second, in all these cases, empathy for the oppressed by influential outsiders came because the outsiders could identify with the oppressed--because, after all, they're people, too. With animal rights, in contrast, (1) the oppressed can never by themselves exert leverage; and (2) the outsiders who work on their behalf, belonging as they do to a different species, must be exquisitely, imaginatively compassionate in order to be drawn to the cause. To judge by history, this is not a recipe for success.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It cannot in the opinion of His Majesty's Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some r...isk of terminological inexactitude.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was accepted tacitly that when he spoke of "our" people it was a black speaking for blacks, subtly different from when he used ..."we" or "us" and this meant an empathy between him and her.... It had come to her that this was the basis that ought to have existed between a man and a woman in general, where it was a question not of a difference of ancestry but of sex.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a democracy--even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-élitist one--the greatest veneration one can show the rule of ...law is to keep a watch on it, and to reserve the right to judge unjust laws and the subversion of the function of the law by the power of the state. That vigilance is the most important proof of respect for the law.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »