Top 35 Louis Yako Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I hope, wherever we are, we start to decolonize knowledge production through rekindling that deep and strong spark between the heart and the mind; through understanding that the path to objectivity goes through the painful corridors of subjectivity.”

— Louis Yako

2. “Marginalization is the worst form of censorship and intellectual assassination.”

— Louis Yako

3. “Oh, Mother Earth, I can only imagine how you feel having to deal with the misfortune of being inhabited by us humans.”

— Louis Yako

4. “Many American people are becoming increasingly unable to afford dying, let alone living.”

— Louis Yako

5. “Christmas and New Year should not be a temporary dose of heroine to sedate people and have them consume more goods, go on vacations, or sit with family and friends at the dinner tables of triviality to boast presumed ‘achievements’ or share pathetic stories about ‘changing the world’.”

— Louis Yako

6. “We both found much more truth in poems than in the rhetoric of those who write to flirt with the power of their time, or those who only speak the ‘truth’ once the word ‘former’ becomes attached to their job titles. We both believed that powerful writing is a combination of madness and reason, observation and courage.”

— Louis Yako

7. “Our understanding of what is really ‘newsworthy’ is a misunderstanding.”

— Louis Yako

8. “Real wisdom lies not in just paying attention to what is being said, but in what is omitted from speeches.”

— Louis Yako

9. “This is exactly what it means to be caught in the colonial matrix of power. It is to be constantly suffering from lack of options, and constantly finding oneself in such a position that all the choices available have already been chosen for you. As a result, you are constantly trapped and unable to think or do otherwise. You are consistently deprived of the possibility of working with other possibilities.”

— Louis Yako

10. “Everyone wants to blast their music, to impose their voice and opinion, to make noise that is loud enough to cover every other voice around them. I wondered what would happen if we truly gave each other a chance and listened carefully to the tunes played by the fancy or broken instruments of each lonely soul around us?”

— Louis Yako

11. “The whole concept of “competition” needs to be revisited. In my view, competition and wisdom are two different paths that will never intersect... we need to seek wisdom rather than playing games and politics against our peers to get status and power.”

— Louis Yako

12. “Under this pine tree I let you down and you let me down. Under this tree, you betrayed me and I betrayed you. Right here, I forgot you and you forgot me. Under this pine that they call ‘evergreen’ we both discovered that nothing lasts forever.”

— Louis Yako

13. “What is happening today has happened yesterday and will happen tomorrow also, unless we take serious steps to stop it.”

— Louis Yako

14. “Don’t let the politicians bought and sold in the political markets, the chosen “analysts”, the assigned “experts”, the co-opted writers on the Empire’s payroll tell you what is newsworthy. Don’t listen to all those who are more interested in fame, in standing on the podiums of arrogance and sitting to dine at the tables of triviality tell you what is newsworthy.”

— Louis Yako

15. “The first problem the corporate culture of customer service creates is humans who are like time bombs ready to explode at any moment. It creates people with double or multiple standards, who say what they do not mean and mean what they do not say. People who hate having to act ‘nice’ eight hours a day, when they really do not want to.”

— Louis Yako

16. “Any sensible human being who has traveled a bit around the world knows that freedom is a myth that doesn’t exist anywhere. They would realize that the red lines and different forms of oppression, though change from one place to another, they actually do exist everywhere based on who is in power.”

— Louis Yako

17. “After all, poor people are only as good as their last service to the masters of the system, and it is based on that last service that they get to have one more paycheck for just one more month of uncertainty.”

— Louis Yako

18. “There is no enemy. It is impossible to genuinely understand any human being and still consider them enemies. Enemies are a myth created to keep us killing each other, to distract us from what matters in this world. If there is an enemy, it is perhaps those who try to convince us that we have one.”

— Louis Yako

19. “Although many of us are struggling against the same oppressive powers worldwide, we are all made to think of each other as enemies rather than allies in this global struggle. We have been separated from each other by the most misleading notion that some of us are citizens of the “First World”, while others are sub-humans from the “Third World”. I dreamed of a time when we all realize that we live in one world not three worlds as politicians and warmongers want us to believe.”

— Louis Yako

20. “I suddenly realized that it is important to never lose sight – and insight – of the fact that what is happening today has happened yesterday and will probably happen tomorrow as well, if we don’t truly understand, learn from, and interrogate history.”

— Louis Yako

21. “In all the languages I speak, they say, ‘I fell in love.’ I always wondered why we have to fall if we are really loved. Why do we not stand in love? Why do we love someone to ‘death’ not to life? Perhaps the day we learn how to stand in language, we shall also be able to stand in love, to love our lovers to life, and to turn the language we speak from chains in our hands into wings to help us fly away from the prison we have built from it.”

— Louis Yako

22. “I propose that we change its abbreviation from ISIL or ISIS into a new name that contains the initial letters of each country or lobby that contributed to its existence.”

— Louis Yako

23. “It should make us take seriously the consequences of a culture in which openness and acceptance are nothing more than part of the job description that some people despise and leave behind like a worn-out shirt once they leave work.”

— Louis Yako

24. “We have to bear in mind that oppression is almost never imposed on people in one big dose, because that could trigger an immediate revolution and uprising. Instead, oppression is given in small doses in such a way that each dose in itself is insignificant or negligible, but it is the total amount of these small doses that creates a great state of oppression and injustice.”

— Louis Yako

25. “Isn’t it quite ironic that we may be coming to a day when we may find all kinds of full-time, steady and secure jobs at universities for all, except jobs for educators?”

— Louis Yako

26. “If it matters, let me whisper a secret in your ears: I have always felt that I was in the wrong place and the wrong time. I am forever out of time and out of place.”

— Louis Yako

27. “I want to bring to life voices that have been erased and silenced before, during, and after the occupation of Iraq in the two gulf wars, because such voices carry the danger of humanizing the Iraqi people, a thing that has to be avoided at all costs by warmongers and war profiteers.”

— Louis Yako

28. “A long silence filled the room. There was a strong feeling of sadness and deep emotions for her and me. I could not utter a single word after that statement, so I decided to ‘be with her’ in my silence rather than in my words.”

— Louis Yako

29. “I am here because I want a place from which I can start over.”

— Louis Yako

30. “It is perhaps a form of disillusionment similar to that experienced in many Eastern European countries the moment many people realized that they have lost whatever benefits they had under the former communist regimes without winning anything in return under the draconian, capitalist EU system of exploitation.”

— Louis Yako

31. “Many treat friendships and other human connections as if they are things they can store in a closet where they can come back one day and find them unaltered. Alas, human connections do not survive with this mentality.”

— Louis Yako

32. “It is not the quantity of publications, but their quality and the effects they have on the real world outside of academia’s ivory tower is what determines whether we shall live way after we exit this world, or perish while still at 30!”

— Louis Yako

33. “Given the current pace of its corporatization, academia may well become the worst institution for indoctrinating and subjugating many brilliant minds that may otherwise have great potential for dissidence and creating a new worldview, which is much needed amid the global turmoil we are experiencing internationally.”

— Louis Yako

34. “After a long journey with wars, moving, and exile, life has grounded me like coffee beans. My mother used to say that ‘coffee beans have less value as whole beans.’ They must be painfully grounded to become this delicious, stimulating, and awakening drink called ‘coffee’.”

— Louis Yako

35. “Why are we so afraid of confronting ourselves? Why do we always use the loud noises of the outside world to mute what our inner voice is trying to tell us?”

— Louis Yako

36. “Like many types of criminals who may often be a product of ills that exist in their society, racists are often products of similar ills – they are the uninformed hand pulling a trigger of a gun handed down to them by a vicious system of indoctrination.”

— Louis Yako

37. “We must rethink and change the worn out concept of the “job market” under capitalism, which is designed to dispose of people in a second if deemed unprofitable to the system.”

— Louis Yako

38. “Reem’s life was one of a lost past, a present she rejected, and a future that is up in the air, like a plane traveling between continents.”

— Louis Yako

39. “This is precisely why the mainstream media’s language has failed us, it has not been telling us what we really need to know, because their language marches in step with that of the bankers, warmongers, oppressors, and executioners. We need a new language of radical love not radical hate.”

— Louis Yako