Everybody: A Book about Freedom QUOTES

2 " From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet— he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this — a thing that has a soul. And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this residence, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required for it? It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done.’ - Simone Weil "

― Olivia Laing , Everybody: A Book about Freedom

4 " To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting. "

― Olivia Laing , Everybody: A Book about Freedom

6 " Damaged people made damaged worlds. "

― Olivia Laing , Everybody: A Book about Freedom

8 " Contrary to what the white supremacists might think, claiming the right to deny other people their liberty is not a freedom movement, and nor is refusing to wear a mask designed to protect other people's health. "

― Olivia Laing , Everybody: A Book about Freedom

10 " Like literature, sex is a space of imaginative play, in which dangerous forces can be encountered and sampled. And like illness, sex is a descent into what Edward St Aubyn once described as ‘the darkness of the pre-verbal realm’, where uncertain ecstasies and terrors lurk. BDSM, the volitional version of the Sadeian revel, is one of the ways of getting there, a route back to the immense feelings of infancy, to the body before language intervened. "

― Olivia Laing , Everybody: A Book about Freedom

12 " The Lavender Scare, the purge began the same year as the Red Scare, and in the same way: as a rumour about State Department infiltration that sparked a national moral panic. Between seven thousand and ten thousand federal workers lost their jobs in the 1950s alone because of suspicions of homosexuality. Many struggled to find work again, and there were many suicides. One of the most formidable components of the purge was Executive Order 10450, signed by Eisenhower on 27 April 1953, three months into his presidency. It barred homosexuals (‘sex perverts’) from federal employment, along with drug addicts, alcoholics, anarchists and anyone else bent on undermining the project of America. "

― Olivia Laing , Everybody: A Book about Freedom

14 " Eugenics regards the human race as a kind of library, some volumes of which need to be removed from circulation. The men ran back and forth, in shiny boots. There were ashes and fragments of burning paper in the air. More and more books were thrown on the fire, books by Freud and Reich and Havelock Ellis: dangerous books, degenerate books, books that dared spell out a lexicon of bodily delights. "

― Olivia Laing , Everybody: A Book about Freedom