Quote by Arundhati Roy: “There is no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced.”

Describing poor or marginalised people as 'voiceless' sounds sympathetic, but it's actually misleading. It suggests they simply lack expression, rather than that their voices are being actively suppressed by power structures. This distinction matters because it puts responsibility where it belongs — not on individuals, but on systems and those who run them.

Roy delivered this in her Sydney Peace Prize lecture in 2004, during the height of the War on Terror. Her lecture challenged the dominant narrative that Western military intervention was saving helpless, silent populations, arguing instead that those populations had voices and demands that were being actively ignored or suppressed.

Indian author and activist from Kerala, best known for her debut novel The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. She subsequently became one of India's most prominent public intellectuals, writing extensively on nuclear weapons, caste, corporate globalization, and state violence. Her essays are collected in multiple volumes including The Algebra of Infinite Justice.