Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
—Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Progress
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
—Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Censorship
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
—Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Sacrifice
Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
—Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts
The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand.
—Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Attachment
In a democracy—even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-elitist 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.
—Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Law
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
—Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Heaven
The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
—Nadine Gordimer
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
—Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Responsibility
The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
—Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Travel, Tourism
Truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
—Nadine Gordimer
Topics: Truth
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Alice Munro Canadian Writer
- Sigrid Undset Norwegian Novelist
- Elfriede Jelinek Austrian Author
- Doris Lessing British Novelist, Poet
- Harold Pinter British Playwright
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Freeman Dyson American Physicist, Author
- Joan Rivers American Entertainer
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Jane Addams American Social Reformer
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