“Humans are accepting the humiliating condition of consuming the Earth. The orishas, just as ancestors from Indigenous communities and other traditions, instituted worlds where people could experiment life, singing and dancing, but it seems that the will of capital is to impoverish existence. Capitalism wants a sad and monotonous world where we operate as robots, and we cannot accept that.”
“The West generated a society of absences. It disconnected us from ancestral memory, from Nature and experiences in community. Avoiding catastrophes requires decolonising life itself.”
“If there is a future to be considered, that future will be ancestral, because it was already here.” ― Ailton Krenak
“Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on 'what happened then' than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again?” ― Saidiya V. Hartman
“There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.” ― Jacques Derrida
“You cannot leave blood in the streets and go away. You must at least collect the blood.”
"Memory is the process of organizing what to forget."
“I’m scared of a history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into one leads only to death.” ― Elias Khoury
“Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.”― Judith Butler
"What the [Nazis] failed to accomplish when alive, they may yet hope to achieve from the grave. They did not manage to turn the world against the Jews, but in their graves they can still dream of turning the Jews against the world, and thus – one way or another – to make the Jewish reconciliation with the world, their peaceful cohabitation with the world, all the more difficult, if not downright impossible. The prophecies of the Holocaust are not quite self-fulfilling, but they do fulfil – render plausible – the prospect of a world in which the Holocaust may never stop being prophesied, with all the deleterious and disastrous psychic, cultural and political consequences which such prophecy is bound to bring forth and propagate." ― Zygmunt Bauman
“Conjuring the world does not necessarily mean changing it completely. You may find that what's right next door to you, which is simple and uncomplicated, could be the better world. These are scenes that show a simple life that depict the – often feminist – world without violence and coercion, which has permeated today's reality. A world where there are no wars.” ― Małgorzata Mirga-Tas