“Marxism teaches that exploitation and degradation somehow produce resistance and revolution. It's been hard to say why. What I've learned from women's experience with sexuality is that exploitation and degradation produce grateful complicity in exchange for survival. They produce self-loathing to the point of extinction of self, and it is respect for self that makes resistance conceivable.”

“because things are not produced causelessly, of from ishvara and so forth, or from other, from self, or both, they are dependently produced.”

“Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. resistance is the enemy within.”

“So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)”

“With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.”

“What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.”