Quotes from Andreas Malm

Property destruction still happens – it's just done by the wrong people for very wrong causes.

Perhaps humanity should thank Covid-19 for taking the early route through Europe.

The alarm signals have echoed without being heard, as in a forgotten cave. Already in 1994, the eminent dialectical biologist Richard Levins and his colleagues warned that 'creating new habitats - for example, by bulldozing forests - permit rare or remote microorganisms to become abundant and gain access to people.

Biodiversity decline can certainly be self-reinforcing, with inbuilt tipping points and deadlines: the Pike paper estimates that business-as-usual closes the 'window of opportunity to deal with pandemics' in 2041.

Disease, in the Gandhian view, results from impurity and must be allowed to do its cleansing work, and the same goes for extreme weather and earthquakes: with unusual consistency, the mahatma preached that victims of such events had it coming.

Corona can be an effect of climate; not the other way around. More importantly, the two are interlaced aspects, on different scale of time and space, of what is now one chronic emergency.

The tolerance for subaltern violence stands in inverse relation to the absoluteness of capitalist dominance and the consequent suffusion of a social formation with violence – the American allergy, in other words, is a pathology.

Property destruction was a particularly distressing prospect. If the cities burned, 'the white man's companies will have to take the losses', whined one close adviser to Kennedy and Johnson.

some exercise of the imagination might allow activists to neutralise CO2-emitting devices with easily accessed means.

People don't need yachts – they want yachts', in the words of a CEO of a top superyacht manufacturer.

If we cannot even get rid of the most preposterously unnecessary emissions, how are we going to begin moving towards zero?

Do we conclude that the only thing left is learning to die – a position already propounded by some – and slide down the side of the crater into three, four, eight degrees of warming? Or is there another phase, beyond peaceful protest?

In the ghettos, as in the extermination camps to which they were the antechamber, the résistants embarked on a race against death. To struggle and resist was the only lucid choice, but this most often meant for the fighters no more than choosing the time and manner of their death. Beyond the immediate outcome of the struggle, which most often was inevitable, their combat was for history, for memory

Not only do the rich make our lives miserable, they are working to terminate the lives of multitudes.

Isn't suffering unearned by the victims precisely what is so morally repugnant about the unfolding crisis? If so, why make it a virtue?

And then there are the events of more recent history, beginning with the victory over apartheid, an analogy particularly popular in conjunction with divestment. 'Just as apartheid was the moral issue' of the late twentieth century, 'climate change is the moral issue of our time', McKibben has said, alluding to suffering in non-white peripheries of the world, and 'the same kind of tactic is what's necessary to face it'.

Martin Luther King – his moral compass a wonder of reliability next to Gandhi's – endorsed this distinction in his apologia for the urban riots of 1967: 'Violent they certainly were. But the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people',

The anti-slavery movement only took off once white people in Europe and America began to see people of African descent not as property but as people.

Talk! Talk! Talk!' he exclaimed after yet another convention of a pacifist abolitionist society. 'That will never free the slaves! What is needed is action – action.

Precisely the hopelessness of the situation constituted the nobility of this resistance.