Adam Braver quotes

Often people who already had an interest in human rights work. What I did notice with all of them, even the people who professed to be interested in human rights, was that activism was somewhat a concept in their mind - a symbolic flag on the quad or something to show how many people were starving in the world. But once they saw their efforts connected to a person, I did see a change.
-- Adam Braver

#Rights #People #Effort

The fact that my students could be in a little college in a little college town on the coast of Rhode Island, and be connecting in other countries with other people, did open them up and empower them and their sense of being. Whether it affected their writing, it's hard to tell.
-- Adam Braver

#Country #Writing #College

If one is writing in a way that is questioning, or even raising questions about how we are supposed to negotiate the world - even if it is about the self, or love, or how human beings relate - I do think that has a certain subversiveness to it. Even if it's not on a geopolitical level.
-- Adam Braver

#Writing #Thinking #Self

I'm really sort of cautious about being too didactic. To me there are writers that can do that, but I think they drown in that after a while. I do think the job of a writer is to raise questions and nobody likes the questions being asked.
-- Adam Braver

#Jobs #Thinking #Raises Questions

What really resonated with my students, I think, is that most of the writers we worked with were journalists, and when they saw journalists simply raising questions and being put in jail for that, it did freak them out a little bit.
-- Adam Braver

#Thinking #Jail #Littles

My sense, and I'm sort of guessing, is that the journalists were being classified by the government as common criminals, and the political prisoners were so resistant to being that. Always keeping [the other prisoners] as murderers, thieves, that sort of thing, which has a certain irony to it, I guess. It's a curious thing.
-- Adam Braver

#Government #Political #Guessing

In many respects most of the books I write deal with well-known people. I think of those books as more about me than about those people.
-- Adam Braver

#Book #Writing #Thinking

I love factoids. It's hard for me to keep those out. It just takes realizing that it's stopping the character. Part of it is the decision to keep things where you want to train the spotlight. For me, it's the personal side. I always ask, How does the person inside the character relate to this?
-- Adam Braver

#Character #Decision #Sides

It's a different way of looking at the world. Your life isn't about rights. It's about responsibilities."--Mr Bill Berkowitz

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

Facts are what pedantic, dull people have instead of opinions.

We must see what in the Israeli identity - in the Israeli - we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory.

Major sports are major parts of society. It's not anomalous to have people who love sports come from other parts of that society.

People seldom refuse help, if one offers it in the right way.

People who deal with life generously and large-heartedly go on multiplying relationships to the end.

Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.

Our response has been, 'Well, let's then make an effort to get the Israelis and the Palestinians to sit around the table.' That hasn't happened. So we only have ourselves to blame for this crisis.

Our photographs are filthier and our stories are more disgusting. We make no effort to be artistic.