Top 60 Sarah Kendzior Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Free speech means not only the right to offend, but the right to defend.”

— Sarah Kendzior

2. “When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.”

— Sarah Kendzior

3. “Pundits and politicians like to say that “No one saw it coming,” but what they mean is that they consider the people who saw it coming to be no one.”

— Sarah Kendzior

4. “Poverty is a sentence for the crime of existing. Poverty is a denial of rights sold as a character flaw.”

— Sarah Kendzior

5. “The Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. The foundation of this edifice was formed not when Trump took office, but decades before, through prolonged engagement with criminal or criminal-adjacent actors linked to hostile regimes, in particular, the Kremlin and its oligarch network.”

— Sarah Kendzior

6. “Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them. Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.”

— Sarah Kendzior

7. “Authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control, it is something that eats away at who you are.”

— Sarah Kendzior

8. “This is called “normalcy bias”: the idea that if a situation is truly dangerous, if massive crimes are being committed in plain sight, someone will intervene and stop them.”

— Sarah Kendzior

9. “The word “conspire” comes from the Latin com and spirare, meaning “to breathe together.”

— Sarah Kendzior

10. “Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear,” scholar of fascism Hannah Arendt wrote after the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.13.”

— Sarah Kendzior

11. “Charity, as a supplement to justice, should be applauded. But charity as a substitute for justice is neither charity nor justice. It is cruelty.”

— Sarah Kendzior

12. “No one saw it coming,” but what they mean is that they consider the people who saw it coming to be no one. The category of “no one” includes the people smeared by Trump in his propaganda: immigrants, black Americans, Muslim Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, LGBT Americans, disabled Americans, and others long maligned and marginalized – groups for whom legally sanctioned American autocracy was not an unfathomable horror, but a personal backstory.”

— Sarah Kendzior

13. “Teaching, nursing, social work, child care, and other “pink collar” professions do not pay poorly because, as Slate’s Hanna Rosin argues, women “flock to less prestigious jobs,” but because jobs are considered less prestigious when they are worked by women. The jobs are not worth less – but the people who work them are supposed to be.”

— Sarah Kendzior

14. “There’s a kind of horror that shakes you to your core, when you start believing in the devil because of what you witness and in hell because you want comfort.”

— Sarah Kendzior

15. “In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters. People for whom these problems must matter – for they structure the limitations of their lives – are locked out of the discussion.”

— Sarah Kendzior

16. “Changing your major will not change a broken economy.”

— Sarah Kendzior

17. “Authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control, it is something that eats away at who you are. It makes you afraid, and fear can make you cruel. It compels you to conform and to comply and accept things that you would never accept, to do things you never thought you would do.”

— Sarah Kendzior

18. “Americans should not fear riots. They should fear apathy. They should fear acquiescence. They should not fear each other. But it is understandable, now, that they do.”

— Sarah Kendzior

19. “In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, privation should not come with the job description, and survival should not be an aspiration.”

— Sarah Kendzior

20. “But the crisis we face now is new. Its transnational nature and reliance on non–state actors who can use digital media to override borders – Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a prime example.”

— Sarah Kendzior

21. “Kushner viewed Netanyahu as his boss and Obama as his enemy.”37.”

— Sarah Kendzior

22. “The absence of complaining should be taken as a sign that something is rotting in a society. Complaining is beautiful. Complaining should be encouraged. Complaining means you have a chance.”

— Sarah Kendzior

23. “The worst thing about the Iraq war was not that people got away with lying. It was that they did not – and it did not matter. The.”

— Sarah Kendzior

24. “Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented,” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said in 2011. “Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.”37 Assange’s.”

— Sarah Kendzior

25. “But it was all predictable, and therefore preventable. Even in that short essay, the future is apparent: Trump not conceding the election and refusing to leave office, the Democrats refusing to investigate and stop obvious crimes, the Republicans committing and abetting obvious crimes, the continued fracturing of Americans into information silos, the knowledge that if these crimes were not confronted they would lead to bigger, more horrific crimes that endangered human life. I.”

— Sarah Kendzior

26. “Poverty is a sentence for the crime of existing. Poverty.”

— Sarah Kendzior

27. “It could always be worse, they say. They don’t like to say that it could always be better, because that would require redress. Ranking.”

— Sarah Kendzior

28. “All social movements are dismissed at some point as complaining. Over time, they are recognized as speaking truth to power.”

— Sarah Kendzior

29. “Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.”

— Sarah Kendzior

30. “Trump is part of a complex illicit network including individuals from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, and more – some of whom do not have loyalty to any particular country. Their loyalty is to themselves and their money.”

— Sarah Kendzior

31. “In the eyes of autocrats and plutocrats, the future is not a right but a commodity. As.”

— Sarah Kendzior

32. “You are not your job. But you are how you treat people. So what can you do? You can work your hardest and do your best. You can organize and push for collective change. You can hustle and scrounge and play the odds. But when you fall, know that millions are falling with you. Know that it is, to a large extent, out of your hands. And when you see someone else falling, reach out your hands to catch them. – Originally.”

— Sarah Kendzior

33. “The crimes are much worse than the scandals, but the media will always take the scandal bait.”

— Sarah Kendzior

34. “When the bubbles popped, and the jobs disappeared, and the debt soared, and the desperation hit, Americans were told to stay positive. Stop complaining – things will not be like this forever. Stop complaining – this is the way things have always been. Complainers suffer the cruel imperatives of optimism: lighten up, suck it up, chin up, buck up. In other words: shut up.”

— Sarah Kendzior

35. “There are marriages that never happened, children never born, chances never taken, because the struggle to hang on to what you have is so great that it hurts your heart to hope for more. You can’t afford the literal cost, and you can’t afford the psychic cost. In the postemployment economy, a generation learned to manage its expectations.”

— Sarah Kendzior

36. “I’m a twenty-first-century American woman; I don’t have enough faith to covet anything but freedom. Over the course of my life, every industry I worked in collapsed, and then my city collapsed, and then my government collapsed.”

— Sarah Kendzior

37. “Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with “exposure” and “experience.” The promotion of unpaid labor has already eroded opportunity – and quality – in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.”

— Sarah Kendzior

38. “The “tycoon or buffoon” strategy is meant to amuse the public, to make Americans believe he either is as successful as he claims to be – after all, The New York Times vouches for him! – or is such an obvious phony that he could not be capable of pulling off a massive criminal enterprise without repercussions.”

— Sarah Kendzior

39. “The new American economy runs on purchased merit, and now we bear the consequences on a national security level.”

— Sarah Kendzior

40. “One wonders how many future politicians, journalists, academics and leaders we are losing because they never have the chance to try. How many people from Hillary Clinton’s middle-class background – or, for that matter, from Bill Clinton’s rural poverty – can afford to tread the path of debt and unpaid labor required to succeed? The.”

— Sarah Kendzior

41. “The internet would seem an antidote to conspiracy theories and state secrecy, but it has only amplified both.”

— Sarah Kendzior

42. “The bedrock of autocracy is laid with the abdication of vigilance.”

— Sarah Kendzior

43. “Dependence may be the primary trait of the millennial generation, but it is a structural dependence, caused not by “laziness” or “narcissism” but by a lack of options or social mobility.”

— Sarah Kendzior

44. “In free societies, people have the right to say hateful things. And those offended have the right to oppose and condemn them.”

— Sarah Kendzior

45. “College is a purchased loyalty oath to an imagined employer.”

— Sarah Kendzior

46. “After Kushner purchased the property, it continued to be a site of illicit dealings. It was in the Grand Havana Room of 666 Fifth Avenue that convicted felons Paul Manafort and Rick Gates gave Kremlin operative Konstantin Kilimnik US election polling data.”

— Sarah Kendzior

47. “The world is a white Bronco and the highway never ends.”

— Sarah Kendzior

48. “Once an autocrat gets into office, it is very hard to get them out. They will disregard term limits, they will purge the agencies that enforce accountability, they will rewrite the law so that they are no longer breaking it. They will take your money, they will steal your freedom, and if they are clever, they will eliminate any structural protections you had before the majority realizes the extent of the damage.”

— Sarah Kendzior

49. “Mistaking wealth for virtue is a cruelty of our time. By treating poverty as inevitable for parts of the population, and giving impoverished workers no means to rise out of it, America deprives not only them but society as a whole. Talented and hardworking people are denied the ability to contribute, and society is denied the benefits of their gifts. Poverty is not a character flaw. Poverty is not emblematic of intelligence. Poverty is lost potential, unheard contributions, silenced voices.”

— Sarah Kendzior

50. “Parties bound by blood or marriage are easier to control.”

— Sarah Kendzior