Precariousness Quotes

Love, built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

~ John Donne

Quick-loving hearts ... may quickly loathe.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

...studies show that in general, optimists die ten years earlier than pessimists.I find that hard to believeOf course you do, you're an optimist. You have a misguided belief that things will go your way. You don't see the dangers till it's too late. Pessimists are more realistic. That seems like a sad way to govern your life.It's a safe way to govern your life.

~ Susin Nielsen

In other words, they appeal to the state for protection, but the state is precisely that from which they require protection. To be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state, so to rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is precisely to exchange one potential violence for another. There may, indeed, be few other choices.

~ Judith Butler

Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.

~ Judith Butler

I argue that even as the war is framed in certain ways to control and heighten affect in relation to the differential grievability of lives, so war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues largely considered separate from foreign affairs.

~ Judith Butler