Columnists

"The public-choice theorists would have us believe that nobody ever gets involved in governments or the political arena out of a desire to accomplish public [goals[]].... Needless to say, the notion that citizens would voluntarily band together to fight injustice and poverty in faraway parts of the world is incomprehensible to this kind of thinking. This perhaps explains the frequent attempt to dismiss those in the anti-globalization movement as nothing more than a group of self-seeking opportunists - as if there is some kind of money to be made in championing debt elimination for the Third World."

"Private courier companies are fine to handle the lucrative parts of the [postal] business. But they have little interest in servicing remote communities, so these areas get poor or non-existent service. Similarly, leaving health care and education to the private marketplace will result in fine services for the affluent but leave many others without access to decent services (or in some cases any services at all). While this kind of deficiency is bad enough when it comes to postal delivery, it becomes downright serious in areas like health care and education."

"Utterly left out of Tax Freedom Day [a holiday marking how many days an average person must work before his or her annual taxes are paid off] is any notion that taxes are what we pay to buy services that we all need and use, and that would be much more expensive or even impossible to purchase privately - fire and police protection, highways, roads, canals, coast guard services, snow removal, water purification, schools, hospitals, libraries, etc. Tax Freedom Day could undoubtably be moved up to early January if we were prepared to walk out of our dwellings that morning onto a dirt path and take our chances on what might befall us."

"Despite loud complaints from members of the financial elite about high tax levels, it's interesting to note that they still manage to live in the finest houses, eat at the best restaurants, shop at the most expensive stores. If this is coercion, we should all experience it."

"Those tempted to slough off the helpful role of the state [in the earning of private property] should... "compare the fortune accumulated by Cornelius Vanderbilt in America with what he might have accumulated had he been adopted when an infant by a family of Hottentots.""

"[[George W. Bush|[George W.] Bush]] explained that he wasn't willing to take the steps outlined in the Kyoto accords - steps that both the scientific world and the international political community had agreed, with a stunning degree of unanimity, were necessary for the future viability of the earth - because he wasn't willing to jeopardize the rate of growth of the American economy. In what sense is this a rational position?"

"All our confidence in our ability to act collectively is being undermined, with the subtext message Whatever it is, the private sector can do it better. Never mind that there's no evidence for this. Never mind, for instance, that the private US health-care system is 40 percent more expensive per capita than the Canadian public system, even though the Canadian system provides full coverage for all Canadians and the American system leaves some forty-three million without any coverage at all. This isn't because Canadians are smarter than Americans - it's because we have a public system and they don't."

""Short-term inequality remains a problem," writes [right-wing scholar Dinesh] D'Souza... "but is it a problem we can live with?" …After searching his soul for a few seconds, he apparently concludes that we can live with it. Of course, inequality always feels like less of a problem to those who don't live in corrugated shacks, which is why sales of D'Souza's book have probably been brisker in Manhattan than in, say, Addis Ababa or Khartoum."

"Not only has capitalism failed to bring us to the brink of a scarcity-free world, but in a sense, you could say that capitalism invented scarcity - at least as a deliberate method of economic organization.... The flipside of this bounty, this endless feast, is scarcity."

"Under the market system, there is demand for a product if a lot of people want it - but that demand counts for nothing if those people have no money. If they lack money, their demand essentially doesn't exist...This explains why the drug industry is not investing money to develop a cure for a disease known as sleeping sickness, which leaves its victims in a coma. The disease...killed 66,000 people last year and threatens to infect 60 million more - but the only people who are afflicted by it are poverty-stricken Africans with no clout in the marketplace. Interestingly, there is a drug called eflornithine that is effective in lifting victims out of their comas. But drug companies stopped producing eflornithine in 1995 because it was no longer profitable to continue. The drug was still desperately needed, but only by people without money. So, following modern market practices, these people were simply left in a coma."

"[A]s things now stand, the case that capitalism will make the world - not just the West - materially better off has simply not been convincingly demonstrated. Indeed, with almost 70 per cent of the world's people experiencing a decline in their real incomes in recent years, the opposite appears to be true. The wanton celebration of market capitalism while so many people throughout the world are lacking basic food and shelter seems, if not downright vulgar, at least a little insensitive."

"Canada got one break in the Walkerton tragedy: the deadly contamination of the Ontario town's water supply, which killed seven people in the summer of 2000, came from cow manure. If the contamination had come instead from, say, a toxic chemical produced by a foreign company, that would have been worse. Then the company might well have sued Canada for hundreds of millions of dollars."

"One of the striking aspects of the new trade deals is that while they have invested corporations with a new set of rights, they have attached no responsibilities to those rights. Notice how the lawsuits all go in one direction - corporations sue governments for infringing their corporate profit-making rights. A government can't sue a corporation for infringing the rights of its citizens by, say, polluting local drinking water."

"Like chewing gum or hair gel, water [according to the World Bank and IMF] is to be sold by the private sector at market rates. The needs of the people are all that's left out of this equation.... [A] World Bank document cites the "willingness to pay" on the part of the people in Ghana as evidence of their recognition of the "health benefits" of drinkable water. It's amazing, isn't it, how people are "willing" to pay huge amounts for things that they need in order to survive!"

"It is almost enough to make one's jaw drop to think that officials at the World Bank and the IMF would suggest that they have poverty alleviation in mind when they force governments to withdraw subsidies that enable poor people to get clean water to drink. If this is a policy aimed at helping the world's poor, it's interesting to imagine what a policy aimed at hurting the world's poor would look like."

"[W]e are assured not just that things will work out over time, but that scarcity is "vanishing before our eyes." Why, look - even as we watch - those 2.8 billion people are going to find food on their plates. Look again in a few hours and their shacks will have toilets - and then air conditioning. In a few days, they'll likely have DVD systems and be doing their banking by cellphone."

"[The] contention that today's rich person is simply the winner of a "race that is open for anyone to enter" takes no account of inheritance or how we are equipped as we enter that race. It doesn't acknowledge that some approach the starting line in streamlined Lycra suits and track shoes, with full knowledge of the rules, a determined attitude and belief in their own abilities, not to mention a close friendship with those setting the rules and choosing the winner. Others, hungry from not having had a meal that day, barely make it to the starting line, don't really understand the purpose of the race or its rules, lack self-confidence and are full of hostility, and are convinced that those officials at the side of the track are actually cops waiting to bust them."

"[W]e have things fundamentally backwards today: we let the needs of the economy dictate the nature of our society, while we should let the needs of our society determine the nature of our economy."

"Thomas Friedman dismissed the protesters in Quebec City as members of the "Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor." …The Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor might as well disband; its apparent goal is being accomplished in spades by pro-market forces. If the prospects of the world's poor improving their lot is one that supposedly upsets anti-capitalist protestors, they can confidently put their gas masks and get back to the shopping mall - global capitalism can be trusted to keep the poor in check without any help."

"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

"Yeah, the good news about the move to abolish the death tax, the tax where they come and look at how much money you've got when you die, how much gold is in your teeth and they want half of it, is that — you're right, there's an exemption for — I don't know — maybe a million dollars now, and it's scheduled to go up a little bit. However, 70 percent of the American people want to abolish that tax. Congress, the House and Senate, have three times voted to abolish it. The president supports abolishing it, so that tax is going to be abolished. I think it speaks very much to the health of the nation that 70-plus percent of Americans want to abolish the death tax, because they see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who played at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, 'Yes, well, that's only 2 percent,' or as people get richer 5 percent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax. I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. 'I mean, it's not you, it's somebody else.' And this country, people who may not make earning a lot of money the centerpiece of their lives, they may have other things to focus on, they just say it's not just. If you've paid taxes on your income once, the government should leave you alone. Shouldn't come back and try and tax you again."

"Our goal is to inflict pain. It is not good enough to win; it has to be a painful and devastating defeat. We're sending a message here. It is like when the king would take his opponent's head and spike it on a pole for everyone to see."

"Alexander Hamilton has been on the $10 since 1928, he's been well honored by the country, he was a great Secretary of the Treasury. But of all the people on the currency, the only one who isn't a president." [Note: Benjamin Franklin, whose portrait appears on the $100 bill, also was not a president.]"

"And we've had four more years pass where the age cohort that is most Democratic and most pro-statist, are those people who turned 21 years of age between 1932 and 1952--Great Depression, New Deal, World War II--Social Security, the draft--all that stuff. That age cohort is now between the ages of 70 and 90 years old, and every year 2 million of them die. So 8 million people from that age cohort have passed away since the last election; that means, net, maybe 1 million Democrats have disappeared--and even the Republicans in that age group. [...] You know, some Bismarck, German thing, okay? Very un-American. Very unusual for America. The reaction to Great Depression, World War II, and so on: Centralization--not as much centralization as the rest of the world got, but much more than is usual in America. We've spent a lot of time dismantling some of that and moving away from that level of regimentation: getting rid of the draft."

"[Democrats] will only become acceptable once they are comfortable in their minority status. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate."

"The president was committed; elected on the basis that he was not Romney and Romney was a poopy head.""

"An armed people are a free people. If our forefathers were not armed before the American Revolution we would all be speaking English today."

"William Jefferson Clinton was America's entertainer-in-chief. But, like the third hour of It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, no matter how good the show is eventually you've had enough. It wasn't public approval that saved Clinton, but public indifference. By the end, even his sex life bored them. To rise to the presidency from Hot Springs - a town where there's no right side of the tracks - is an amazing feat. To survive in office despite being your own smokin' gun is spectacular."

"It's not a clash between civilisations but within them - in the Muslim world, between what's left of moderate traditional Islam and an extreme strain of that faith that even many of their co-religionists have difficulty living with; and in the West between those who think this culture is worth defending and those who'd rather sleepwalk to national suicide while mumbling bromides about whether Western hedonism is to blame for 'lack of services for locals' in Bali. To read Robert Frisk and Margo Kingston is like watching a panto cast on drugs: No matter how often the baddies say, 'I'm behind you!', Robert and Margo reply, 'Oh, no, you're not!'"

"[On protests against going to war with Iraq] One woman bore a picture of some female genitalia – possibly hers, the provenance was obscure – over the caption 'This Bush Is For Peace.' Another waxed eloquent: 'Trim Bush.' Out in Marin County somewhere, other bushes for peace disrobed, lay down on a hillside, and formed the words 'No War.' I wonder if there are any conflicted nudists, with a bush for Iraq and a rack for Bush."

"[On John Edwards, U.S. Senator from North Carolina] The stump speech of pretty-boy Senator John Edwards, which I've heard often enough to be able to mouth along with him, has room for everything, including vivid, wrenching portraits of despair: 'Tonight somewhere in America a ten-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm.' You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be doubled up in laughter at that line."

"[On the movie Monster] I confess I went into the movie ready to dislike Miss Theron. I'm sick of newspaper articles detailing the amount of time, talent and technical wizardry required to turn some silver-screen beauty into an average-looking woman. There are plenty of average-looking women out there — gritty Britty TV drama seems to be full of them — and it seems excessively unfair that they can't even get a shot at the frumpy roles because Nicole Kidman's hogging the false nose again."

"Picture a French election circa 2020, 2025: the Islamic Republican Coalition wins the most seats in the National Assembly."

"Bisexuality is the proportional representation of sexuality in a world where most of us — straight or gay — operate a first-past-the-post system."

"[On David Cameron's Conservative Party] The carbon emissions trading system imposed by Kyoto is absurd and entirely ineffectual, but in London, David Cameron wants to apply it to hamburgers. Cameron wants to impose some sort of Kyoto-esque calorie trading system on fast-food purveyors whereby McDonald's would have some trans-fat cap imposed to ensure they pick up the tab for what that $3 Big Mac really costs society. And David Cameron is the leader of the alleged Conservative Party. He's also living in a country whose major cities have been hollowed out by Islamist cells. Nevertheless, as England decays into Somalia with chip shops, taxing the chip shops is the Conservatives' priority."

"[On the French view of international politics] According to my dictionary, the word 'ally' comes from the Old French. Very Old French, I'd say. For the New French, the word has a largely postmodern definition of 'duplicitous charmer who undermines you at every opportunity.'"

"[On Al Gore] The Eco-Messiah sternly talks up the old Nazi comparisons: "what we're facing is an ecological Holocaust, and the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin." That 221,000 kilowatt-hours might suggest that, if this is the ecological Holocaust, Gore's pad is Auschwitz. But, as his spokesperson would no doubt argue, when you're faced with ecological Holocausts and ecological Kristallnachts, sometimes the only way to bring it to an end is with an ecological Hiroshima. The Gore electric bill is the eco-atom bomb: you have to light up the world in order to save it."

"Multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon."

"There's no fine line between "free speech" and "hate speech": Free speech is hate speech; it's for the speech you hate – and for all your speech that the other guy hates. If you don't have free speech, then you can't have an honest discussion."

"A "Hillary rally" is a contradiction in terms: the thin, vetted crowd leave more demoralized and depressed than when they went in."

"Trump, like other philosophically erratic politicians from Denmark to Greece, has tapped into a very basic strain of cultural conservatism: the question of how far First World peoples are willing to go in order to extinguish their futures on the altar of "diversity"."

"It is so depressing to watch, almost on a daily basis, the erasure of great men by know-nothing non-entities who can build nothing, create nothing, do nothing but destroy all that does not conform to the ever shifting pieties of present-tense virtue-signalling."

"The western world's leaders - Trudeau, Merkel, Pelosi - are bored by their own people. And they're making it ever plainer that the replacements they have in mind are not just newer and different but better."

"Remember the way old-school feminists used to go on about how this and that was "phallocentric"? Some of them are a bit shocked to find that somehow the wily old phallus outmaneuvered them and that women themselves can now be literally phallocentric... As I always say: Oh, you can laugh, but none of the people who matter in our society are laughing - like the police and the politicians and the judges and the "educators"... So in nothing flat we are on our way not merely to the abolition of the sexes but to a world in which it is no longer permissible even to suggest that someone hung like a horse is not a woman. As Justin [Trudeau] would say, such views "have no place in our country"."

"The things our news media talks about incessantly, whether it’s transgender bathrooms or Confederate statues being toppled or the totally dishonest national conversation on race—nothing like this is heard in China as it goes along steadily strengthening its position as the world’s leading power. The Chinese don’t find themselves stuck in these sterile, drain-circling, dishonest public conversations about identity politics. These conversations are a waste of time. And one thing we should demand of our politicians is that they talk about things that aren’t a waste of time."

"Our political division in America today is a class division, and we need to expose it as such whenever we see it. The ruling class tries to keep racial and other forms of division stirred up in our politics so that we don’t notice the class protection racket they are running."

"This is what’s so frightening about the trends in education today. Cromwell told his portrait painter, ‘Paint me, warts and all.’ That’s not what is happening in America, where the trend in education is to paint only America’s warts. So even the great Kate Smith, who sang “God Bless America” for years, is having her statue taken down because she made a racially insensitive record in 1931. Well you know who really had a racially insensitive record in 1931? The Democratic Party. But unlike Kate Smith’s statue, it’s still around."

"I find myself at odds with virtually the entire politico-media class in my reaction to the "storming" of the US Capitol... I was surprised that even politicians and pundits could utter all that eyewash about "the citadel of democracy" and "a light to the world" with a straight face. It's a citadel of crap, and the lights went out long ago: ask anyone who needs that $600 "relief"."

"Reverend Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the People’s Republic of Himself."

"In the multicultural West, our values are that we have no values: we accord all values equal value; the wittering English feminist concerned that her tolerance is implicitly intolerant of the Sudanese wife-beater and compulsory clitorectomy scheduler."

"As for 'cultural genocide', if there's any going on these days, it's the genocide of the Britannic inheritance — in North America, in the Antipodes, in Blair's Britain."

"To London's Europhiles, Britain is obviously "part of" Europe. But, in the age of jet travel, cellphones, wire transfers and the internet, we are less bound by physical proximity than ever. Yet Britain for the first time in history has chosen to be imprisoned by geography and to disconnect itself from its own culture."

"The principle underpinning the EU is not "We, the people" but "We know better than the people" — not just on capital punishment and the single currency, but on pretty much anything that comes to mind. Not so long ago, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, France's Defence Minister at the time, insisted that the United States was dedicated to the "organized cretinization of our people." As a dismissal of American pop culture — MTV, Disney — this statement is not without its appeal, though it sounds better if you've never had the misfortune to sit through a weekend of continental television. But the reality is that nobody is as dedicated to the proposition that the people are cretins than M. Chevenement and the panjandrums of the new 'Europe.' The EU is organized on this assumption. If, like the Danes and now the Irish, they're impertinent enough to tick the wrong box in referenda on deeper European integration, we'll just keep asking and re-asking the question until they get it right."

"As I understand it, the benefits of multiculturalism are that the sterile white-bread cultures of Britain, Canada and Australia get some great ethnic restaurants and a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony that lasts until two in the morning. But in the case of those Muslim ghettoes — in Sydney, in Oslo, in Paris, Copenhagen and Manchester — multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture — the subjugation of women — combine with the worst attributes of Western culture — licence and self-gratification. Tattoed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of Northern England are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the vice-regal escort at Rideau Hall. Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its most cherished causes — women's rights and gay rights — the political elite turns squeamishly away."

"We're told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they thought of the wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least considered them capable of improvement. The multiculturalists are just as racist. The only difference is they think the wogs can never reform: good heavens, you can't expect a Muslim in Norway not to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better just to get used to it."

""As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I am not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture — rule of law, universal suffrage — is preferable to Arab culture. That's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation."

"In 1970, the developed nations had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30 percent to 15 percent. By 2000, they were at parity: each had about 20 percent. And by 2020?"

"We are witnessing the end of the late 20th-century progressive welfare democracy. Its fiscal bankruptcy is merely a symptom of a more fundamental bankruptcy: its insufficiency as an animating principle for society. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly. Over on the other side of the equation, the modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship. So they look elsewhere and find the jihad. The Western Muslim’s pan-Islamic identity is merely the first great cause in a world where globalized pathologies are taking the place of old-school nationalism."

"The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood - health care, child care, care of the elderly - to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not the least the survival instinct."

"I'm a "social conservative." When the mullahs take over, I'll grow my beard a little fuller, get a couple extra wives, and keep my head down. It's the feminists and gays who'll have a tougher time."

"On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic."

"The evidence suggests a third of all births [in France] are already Muslim."

"Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it’s a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European."

"Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an “Arms are for Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams."

"Unfortunately, magnanimity is often seen as weakness by those on the receiving end. It's easy to be sensitive, tolerant, and multicultural — it's the default mode of the age — yet, when you persist in being sensitive to the insensitive, tolerant of the intolerant, and impeccably multicultural about the avowedly unicultural, don't be surprised if they take it for weakness."

"Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we've led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide that who and what we are is worth defending."

"The great thing about multiculturalism is it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures — the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I think was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society."

"As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it, "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder", as can be seen throughout much of the Western world right now. The progressive agenda — lavish social welfare, abortion, agnosticism, multiculturalism — is collectively the real suicide bomb."

"Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate."

"It seems more likely [...] that by 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations [in EU] on American network news every night."

"Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb; the grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the race who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world."

"A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind" question is more urgent than most of us expected. The Western world, as a concept, is dead and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying."

"Churchill called his book The History of the English-Speaking Peoples – not the English-Speaking Nations. The extraordinary role played by those nations in the creation and maintenance of the modern world derived from their human capital. What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital? The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. A couple of years ago, the papers reported that stabbings are so rampant in British schoolyards that a company that specializes in military body armor is now manufacturing school blazers lined with Kevlar. For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population."

"Europe’s economic crisis is a mere symptom of its existential crisis. What is life for? What gives it meaning? Post-Christian, post-nationalist, post-modern Europe has no answer to that question, and so it has 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees, and wonders why the small band of workers in between them can’t make the math add up."

"Faced with public discontent about the statist agenda, the Condescendi look out the window at the unlovely mob in their "Don't treat on me" T-shirts and sneer, "The peasants are revolting." You oppose illegal immigration? You're a xenophobe. Gay marriage? Homophobe. The Ground Zero mosque? Islamaphobe. If that's the choice, I'd rather be damned as a racist and sexist. The evolution from -isms to phobias is part of the medicalization of dissent: the Conformicrats simply declare your position as a form of mental illness."

"When you hit the expressway to Declinistan there are few exit ramps. That America's animating principles should require a defense at all is a melancholy reflection on how far we've already gone."

"You cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without grave consequences. We are approaching the end of the Anglo-American moment, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world."

"The arrogance of Mark Steyn knows no bounds"

"Our treatment plants will always be ready to receive the literary outpourings emanating from his most humane soil"

"Unlike Llewelyn Morgan, Mark Steyn was hauled before the Canadian Human Rights Commission there to defend freedom of speech. The reason is that Islamic militants and their Western dupes are attacking free speech everywhere: the former with guns and bombs, the latter with litigation and specious arguments."

"What else would be as impressive as a status symbol than when you are visiting a billionaire for lunch and you and dozens of other refined guests are offered a glass of fresh milk to toast everybody’s health, instead of a glass of Chateau Rotschild Lafitte?"

"As a nation of servants, you (Filipinos) don’t flex your muscles at your master, from whom you earn most of your bread and butter. ...They may have Barack Obama and the hawkish American military behind them, but we have a hostage in each of our homes in the Mid-Levels or higher."

"Not a single one, not a single one among us, in 200 years, has won a battle... and this is what it is to be colonized! When we have but martyrs! How can we have aspirations!? How can we have the will to fight!?"

"Homogenization sterilizes. It's the sum of cultures and languages that makes humanity"

"If, as is believed by many Canadians, Canada can not exist without Quebec, then it simply does not deserve to exist."

"It is almost normal to be racist, but it is criminal to remain one."

"Non-supply siders: Concern themselves with 'How to divide up a [fixed] pie'. Supply siders: Concern themselves with 'How to make a bigger pie.'"

"Television is to news as a bumper sticker is to Shakespeare. I remember hearing an analogy once that went something like that. Your typical nightly, 35-minute TV news broadcast is a headline service with pictures. Five minutes of police-blotter reporting - fires, murders, car accidents, etc. - five minutes of human-interest stories and small talk, five minutes of weather, five minutes of sports, ten minutes of commercials, and maybe a minute or two for business, science, politics, and affairs of the world."

"We protect the right of pacifists and other anti-war militants to assemble and advance their cause. But I don’t respect such people and I don’t shrink from exposing their ideas as destructive and suicidal. Pacifists are my enemy because wittingly or not, they serve the purposes of my enemy and jeopardize my freedom."

"One of the hackneyed liberal complaints goes something like this: 'Bush is the first president in history to cut taxes during a war.' Nonsense. Bush didn’t cut taxes; he cut tax rates across the board - on income, dividends and capital gains. And that’s precisely why tax revenues have soared. When a department store wants to make more money, it doesn’t raise its prices, it cuts them and announces a big sale. If you want more work and investment, you hold a sale on economic activity by cutting tax rates, thereby reducing the cost of productive activity and increasing the prospect of after-tax returns on work and investment."

"I don't believe that [blacks in New Orleans immediately prior to Hurricane Katrina]couldn't afford a bus ticket out of New Orleans for a minute- they might not be able to drive out in a brand new Lincoln, but they could afford a bus ticket."

"Conservatives believe in individual freedom and responsibility. Liberals believe in sacrificing individual freedom for socially desirable outcomes. Liberals believe that one of government's primary roles is social engineering."

"Conservatives believe in limited government. Liberals believe in intrusive government when required to achieve societal needs. (Exception: social-issues conservatives advocate government intrusion on matters of abortion, drugs and pornography.)"

"Conservatives believe in free markets. Liberals believe in government controls and central planning."

"Conservatives believe that some problems have no solution, that they can only be mitigated at best. Liberals believe that most every problem has a government solution."

"Conservatives are concerned about the production of wealth. Liberals are concerned about the redistribution of it."

"Conservatives believe in equality of opportunity. Liberals believe in equality of outcome."

"Conservatives believe that human nature is what makes us imperfectible. Liberals believe that human nature can be changed and perfected."

"Conservatives are nationalists. Liberals hope for world government."

"Conservatives believe in peace through strength. Liberals believe in peace through cooperation and good will."

"Don’t tell me you are a moderate. Moderate is an adjective. It is a qualifier. You may be a moderate conservative, a moderate democrat, or a moderate drinker but it doesn’t tell me what you believe in. It’s not a philosophy. Unless all you believe in is moderation for the sake of moderation. Grow up! You can’t be a good egg all of your life. Someday you have to either hatch or rot."

"Ideology is about ideas; politics is about winning elections."

"Beijing is now the second-largest funder of the UN and UN peacekeepers. It has deployed 2,500 peacekeepers, more than all the other permanent members of the Security Council combined. Between 2000 and 2008 it supported 182 of 190 Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions on nations deemed to have violated international rules or norms."

"Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since... As with most deaths, many factors contributed to this one. There were deep structural forces in the international system that inexorably worked against any one nation that accumulated so much power. In the American case, however, one is struck by the ways in which Washington—from an unprecedented position—mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies. And now, under the Trump administration, the United States seems to have lost interest, indeed lost faith, in the ideas and purpose that animated its international presence for three-quarters of a century."

"U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire. Writers are fond of dating the dawn of “the American century” to 1945, not long after the publisher Henry Luce coined the term. But the post–World War II era was quite different from the post-1989 one. Even after 1945, in large stretches of the globe, France and the United Kingdom still had formal empires and thus deep influence. Soon, the Soviet Union presented itself as a superpower rival, contesting Washington’s influence in every corner of the planet."

"On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq, [President Bush's] assumptions and policies have been wrong. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw."

"Strip away the usual hot air, and bin Laden's audiotape is the sign of a seriously weakened man."

"America washes its dirty linen in public. When scandals such as this one hit, they do sully America's image in the world. But what usually also gets broadcast around the world is the vivid reality that the United States forces accountability and punishes wrongdoing, even at the highest levels."

"Interview with Tzipi Livni the day after Hamas attacked Israel"

"[I]f we truly value coral reefs, we must stop travelling around the world to see them, for long-haul flights are rapidly becoming one of the major sources of global warming. Why is it that tourism always seems condemned to destroy that which it most loves?"

"To own a national newspaper or a television or radio station you need to be a multimillionaire. What multimillionaires want is what everybody wants: a better world for people like themselves. The job of their journalists is to make it happen. As Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Mirror, confessed, "I've made it a strict rule in life to ingratiate myself with billionaires." They will stay in their jobs for as long as they continue to interpret the interests of the proprietorial class correctly."

"While there are many reasons for the growth of individualism in the UK, the extreme libertarianism now beginning to take hold here begins on the road. When you drive, society becomes an obstacle."

"If you travel to Worth Matravers - the chocolate-box village in Dorset in which 60% of the houses are owned by ghosts - you will not find hordes of homeless people camping on the pavements in cardboard boxes. The market does not work like that. Young people from the village, unable to buy locally, have moved away, and contributed to the housing pressure somewhere else. The impacts of the ghost market might be invisible to the purchasers, but this does not mean they aren't real. Second-home owners are perhaps the most selfish people in the United Kingdom. In England and Wales there are 250,000 second homes. In England there are 221,000 people classed as single homeless or living in hostels or temporary accommodation. (These desperate cases comprise about 24% of those in need of social housing.) I am not arguing that if every underused house were turned back into a home the problem of acute homelessness would be solved. I am arguing that homelessness has been exacerbated by the government's failure to ensure that houses are used for living in."

"No political challenge can be met by shopping."

"Everything has been globalised, except our consent. Democracy alone has been confined to the nation state. It stands at the border, suitcase in hand, without a passport."

"Our task is not to overthrow globalisation, but to capture it, and to use it as a vehicle for humanity’s first global democratic revolution."

"We are the most fortunate generation that has ever lived. And we are the most fortunate generation that ever will."

"Nobody ever rioted for austerity. (p. 96)"

"Faced with a choice between the survival of the planet and a new set of matching tableware, most people would choose the tableware."

"If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire."

"[T]he most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as "the 'greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the unexcelled protector of the consumer". As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a "superlatively moral system"."

"People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility. Forests are felled to make “personalised heart shaped wooden cheese board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us."

"[On the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from Working Group 1 of the w:IPCC Fifth Assessment Report] What the report describes, in its dry, meticulous language, is the collapse of the benign climate in which humans evolved and have prospered, and the loss of the conditions upon which many other lifeforms depend. Climate change and global warming are inadequate terms for what it reveals. The story it tells is of climate breakdown."

"[T]he only effective means of preventing climate breakdown is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Press any minister on this matter in private and, in one way or another, they will concede the point. Yet no government will act on it."

"Before examining the wider picture, let's stick with the shooting theme for a moment, and take a look at the remarkable shape-shifting properties of that emblem of Downton Abbey Britain: the pheasant. Through a series of magnificent legal manoeuvres it can become whatever the nation's wealthy want it to be."

"The pheasant's properties of metamorphosis should be a rich field of study for biologists: even the Greek myths mentioned no animal that mutated so often. In the treatment of pheasant and grouse shoots we see in microcosm what is happening in the country as a whole. Legally, fiscally and politically, the very rich are protected from the forces afflicting everyone else."

"[About the :] By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster."

"Trump's [cabinet] appointments reflect what I call the Pollution Paradox. The more polluting a company is, the more money it must spend on politics to ensure it is not regulated out of existence. Campaign finance therefore comes to be dominated by dirty companies, ensuring that they wield the greatest influence, crowding out their cleaner rivals. Trump’s cabinet is stuffed with people who owe their political careers to filth."

"While we call ourselves animal lovers, and lavish kindness on our dogs and cats, we inflict brutal deprivations on billions of animals that are just as capable of suffering. The hypocrisy is so rank that future generations will marvel at how we could have failed to see it."

"[E]ight days after the Khan Shaykhun attack John Pilger, famous for exposing propaganda and lies, was interviewed on the website Consortium News. He praised [[Theodore Postol|[Theodore] Postol]] as "the distinguished MIT professor", suggested that the Syrian government could not have carried out the attack – as he claimed it had destroyed its chemical arsenal in 2014 – and maintained that jihadists in Khan Shaykhun "have been playing with nerve gases and sarin … for some years now. There’s no doubt about that." Despite many claims to the contrary, I have found no credible evidence that Syrian jihadists have access to sarin."

"[A] kind of cult has developed around Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, which cannot believe they could ever be wrong, and produces ever more elaborate conspiracy theories to justify their mistakes."

"Oligarchic control [...] thwarts rational decision-making, because the short-term interests of the elite are radically different to the long-term interests of society."

"Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity."

"Of all the varieties of media bias, the deepest is the bias against relevance. The more important the issue, the less it is discussed."

"The power of consumerism is that it renders us powerless. It traps us within a narrow circle of decision-making, in which we mistake insignificant choices between different varieties of destruction for effective change. It is, we must admit, a brilliant con. It’s the system we need to change, rather than the products of the system. It is as citizens that we must act, rather than as consumers. [...] Only mass political disruption, out of which can be built new and more responsive democratic structures, can deliver the necessary transformation."

"[T]he Earth’s systems are highly complex, and complex systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways. When these systems interact (because the world’s atmosphere, oceans, land surface and lifeforms do not sit placidly within the boxes that make study more convenient), their reactions to change become highly unpredictable. Small perturbations can ramify wildly. Tipping points are likely to remain invisible until we have passed them. We could see changes of state so abrupt and profound that no continuity can be safely assumed. Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend – soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity – need fail for everything to slide."

"The problem is political. [...] The oligarchic control of wealth, politics, media and public discourse explains the comprehensive institutional failure now pushing us towards disaster. Think of Donald Trump and his cabinet of multi-millionaires; the influence of the Koch brothers in funding rightwing organisations; the Murdoch empire and its massive contribution to climate science denial; or the oil and motor companies whose lobbying prevents a faster shift to new technologies. It is not just governments that have failed to respond, though they have failed spectacularly. broadcasters have systematically shut down environmental coverage, while allowing the opaquely funded lobbyists that masquerade as thinktanks to shape public discourse and deny what we face. Academics, afraid to upset their funders and colleagues, have bitten their lips. Even the bodies that claim to be addressing our predicament remain locked within destructive frameworks."

"Those to whom we look for solutions trundle on as if nothing has changed. As if the accumulating evidence has no purchase on their minds. Decades of institutional failure ensures that only "unrealistic" proposals – the repurposing of economic life, with immediate effect – now have a realistic chance of stopping the planetary death spiral. And only those who stand outside the failed institutions can lead this effort. Two tasks need to be performed simultaneously: throwing ourselves at the possibility of averting collapse, as Extinction Rebellion is doing, slight though this possibility may appear; and preparing ourselves for the likely failure of these efforts, terrifying as this prospect is. Both tasks require a complete revision of our relationship with the living planet."

"Because we cannot save ourselves without contesting oligarchic control, the fight for democracy and justice and the fight against environmental breakdown are one and the same."

"There are two ways this could go. We could, as some people have done, double down on denial. Some of those who have dismissed other threats, such as climate breakdown, also seek to downplay the threat of Covid-19... Or this could be the moment when we begin to see ourselves, once more, as governed by biology and physics, and dependent on a habitable planet. Never again should we listen to the liars and the deniers. Never again should we allow a comforting falsehood to trounce a painful truth. No longer can we afford to be dominated by those who put money ahead of life..."

"Climate change requires the end of capitalism, full-stop. Capitalism has three innate characteristics that drive us towards destruction, and it doesn’t really matter what kind of capitalism it is, whether it’s Keynesian, whether it’s neo-liberal capitalism, whether it’s corporate capitalism, or whether it’s crony capitalism. The problem is not with the adjective, but with the noun. Capitalism has three innate characteristics that drive us towards destruction… firstly, that it generates and relies upon perpetual growth... (Second:)…the idea that our right to own natural wealth equates to the amount of money that we’ve got in the bank or we can borrow. So, you can take as much natural wealth away from other people as you like.... The third characteristic is the one that really ensures that people go along with capitalism, the idea that everyone can pursue — and can expect to find — private luxury."

"During the pandemic, many of us have begun to discover how much of our travel is unnecessary. Governments can build on this to create plans for reducing the need to move, while investing in walking, cycling and – when physical distancing is less necessary – public transport. This means wider pavements, better cycle lanes, buses run for service not profit. They should invest heavily in green energy, and even more heavily in reducing energy demand – through, for example, home insulation and better heating and lighting. The pandemic exposes the need for better neighbourhood design, with less public space given to cars and more to people. It also shows how badly we need the kind of security that a lightly taxed, deregulated economy cannot deliver."

"Let's have what many people were calling for long before this disaster hit: a green new deal. But please let’s stop describing it as a stimulus package. We have stimulated consumption too much over the past century, which is why we face environmental disaster. Let us call it a survival package, whose purpose is to provide incomes, distribute wealth and avoid catastrophe, without stoking perpetual economic growth. Bail out the people, not the corporations. Bail out the living world, not its destroyers. Let's not waste our second chance."

"The bigger and more established an organisation becomes the more timid and conformist it seems to get, until it's almost indistinguishable from the interests it should be confronting. In this age of environmental crisis and collapse, of government lies and corporate power, we need our nature defenders to rise like lions after slumber. Instead, they queue at the abattoir gate like sedated lambs."

"All of Earth’s systems are complex, which means they do not respond to change in linear and steady ways. They absorb stress up to a certain point, then suddenly collapse. If one goes down, it can trigger the collapse of others: during previous mass extinctions, collapse seems to have cascaded from one ecosystem and Earth system to the next."

"[On COP27 held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt] The rich world's governments arrived at the conference in Egypt saying "it's now or never". They left saying "how about never?". We sail through every target and objective, red line and promised restraint towards a future in which the possibility of anyone’s existence starts to dwindle towards zero."

"If you are holding a virtual gun to someone's head, you need to know exactly what you are demanding and whether they can deliver it."

"Our demands are – and have to be – more complex than any that have gone before."

"Fascism has been famously described as "a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place". You don't have to succeed in generating a new movement committed to a campaign of violence to create a monster much bigger than you are: a monster that will close down the last chance of saving Earth systems. If you are going to take a physical shot at capitalism, you had better not miss."

"I cannot say that Malm is wrong, and that non-violent action is more likely to succeed. After all, none of us have been here before. But if you are pushing other people towards decades in prison while risking a backlash that would close down the last possibility of success, you need to be pretty confident that the strategy will work. I have no such confidence."

"As the impacts of our consumption kick in thousands of miles away, and people come to our borders desperate for refuge from a crisis they played almost no role in causing – a crisis that might involve real floods and real droughts – the same political forces announce, without a trace of irony, that we are being "flooded" or "sucked dry" by refugees, and millions rally to their call to seal our borders."

"In some cases, the cycle plays out in one place. Florida, for example, is one of the US states most prone to climate disaster, especially rising seas and hurricanes. But its governor, Ron DeSantis, is building his bid for the presidency on the back of climate denial."

"According to Google's news search, the media has run more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of five news stories about a scientific paper published last week, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in the world’s major growing regions, caused by climate breakdown, appear to have been dangerously underestimated. In mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk."

"[P]erhaps the most pernicious innovation was to shut down crucial legal defences. One attorney general removed the defence of proportionality; another removed the defence of lawful excuse. This means that environmental activists can no longer explain their motives to a jury. They have to be tried as though they were mindless vandals, inconveniencing people for kicks, rather than seeking to prevent, at great cost to themselves, the greatest crisis humankind has ever faced. Some protesters have sought to explain themselves regardless, and have as a result been imprisoned for contempt of court."

"The new government now seeks to address one grim Tory legacy, our bursting prisons, by releasing prisoners – including violent offenders – early. At the same time it fails to address or even mention another and even worse inheritance: the jailing of entirely peaceful people seeking to prevent existential disaster. Perhaps the prisons can be emptied of violent criminals so they can be refilled with environmentalists."

"Fisheries science asks: "How many fish can we keep taking?" Marine ecology asks: "What would living systems look like if we stopped?" Even practitioners often mix them up."

"As a general rule, though there are dissidents, fisheries science is not so much an academic discipline as a branch of accountancy. It works on behalf of government and industry, and has many failures to its name: frequently setting higher catch rates – often with unjustified precision – than fish populations can sustain. Even so, governments ... routinely set quotas higher than the scientists recommend. Then they fail to enforce the rules, ensuring that even more fish than they allow are taken. Then everyone wonders why fish populations collapse. Sorry, not populations, "stocks". Fish, in this schema, exist only to be exploited."

"Corporations’ freedom detracts from our freedom, and it’s a zero-sum game."

"On December 12, 2015, official delegates and observers gathered in the plenary hall of COP21. It was there that the Paris Agreement was announced. The end result of decades of work, world leaders hailed it as a great success. "The Paris Agreement is a monumental triumph for people and our planet," UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon tweeted immediately after the closing gavel fell. Many environmental groups praised the outcome as well…Not everyone agreed. Joining Michael Brune on Democracy Now!, British journalist and author George Monbiot countered, "What I see is an agreement with no timetables, no targets, with vague, wild aspirations. It's almost as if it's now safe to adopt 1.5 degrees centigrade as their aspirational target now that it is pretty well impossible to reach. I see a lot of backslapping, a lot of self-congratulation, and I see very little in terms of the actual substance that is required to avert climate breakdown." Monbiot wrote, "By comparison to what it could have been, it's a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it's a disaster.""

"The number one rule of today's marketing – the key secret of those who seek to control your beliefs and habits in order to take your money, your votes, your time or whatever else it is they desire from you – is to always keep in mind that nobody really believes they can be manipulated."

"Not every article in every magazine or newspaper is meant to be a valentine card addressed to every reader's self-esteem."

"Stay away from philosophy, kids: it will ruin your mind."

"There are ways to get worse publicity than Tom Wappel, the MP who wrote an 81–year–old, a veteran, legally blind and partially deaf, and told him, sneeringly, in effect to get lost– because the old man had not voted Liberal. [...] Here are some:"

"Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them."

"One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices — 545 human beings out of the 235 million — are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country."

"When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise complete power over the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist. If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair. If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red. If the Marines are in Lebanon, it’s because they want them in Lebanon."

"But regardless of whose fault it is, most politicians today are not human beings. You want to pry open their mouths and shout into the darkness, 'Hello! Is there a human being in there?' Buried under all that lust for office, all that fear of offending a contributor? I know there must be."

"If we could manage our own finances the way the Congress does the nation’s, we’d all be living in high cotton and eating high on the hog."

"If you look at Washington, you see permanently camped on the banks of the Potomac spread around in concentric circles an army representing thousands of selfish interests. The sole purpose of their presence is to plunder, by hook or crook, the public treasury for the benefit of their particular people or corporations."

"Some lawyers and judges may have forgotten it, but the purpose of the court system is to produce justice, not slavish obedience to the law."

"We have to stop allowing economics to be used as a trump card. Capitalism is like math. It is amoral. It is good at producing wealth; it's bad at distributing wealth. Unless it operates within a moral framework it will produce an unjust society."

"Whenever there is an absolute truth at stake, the manners become careless. This applies both to the owners as well as their opponents of that truth and to all people involved."

"During one of my annual visits to the great Fred Winter's yard I said to him, 'Good God, Fred, your horses look magnificent. Beautifully fit.' Of course they do, you twit,' he said. 'They don't sit up all night drinking gin and tonic and playing cards.'"

"Since 1960 or thereabouts, when the Beatles and feminism came to power and destroyed the civilisation I was rather fond of..."

"In 1950 when I was boxing I wanted to put on 3lb so my trainer made me put a teaspoon of powdered gelatine into the cup every time I took tea. It was fairly revolting & might possibly explain the final hammering I took."

"[On the Feminist Dale Spender] It staggers me. In fact I have not been so staggered since I last wore 8oz gloves."

"As for asking me have I ever felt remorse after drinking, I have been living with remorse for years now. She wakes me up every morning. She puts me to bed at night and yea though I run through the valley of Oxford St to the Coach & Horses she is by my side."

"I could stuff a pillow with the amount of confetti I have had thrown at me. And could I sleep easily on that? No."

"I once had to dispense with a literary agent because she drank too much. She was very surprised but I pointed out to her, quite logically I thought, that one of us had to be sober and it certainly wasn't going to be me."

"I'd very much like to wake up one morning with a cow of the Friesian variety and walk her down to Soho to the Coach and Horses, stopping on the way to buy twenty Players, ply her with vodkas until closing time, whip her off to an Indian restaurant, take her up to the Colony Room till 5.30 and then to the Yorkminster, Swiss Tavern, Three Greyhounds, get beaten up by Chinese waiters at midnight, have a row with the taxi driver, set the bed on fire, put it out with tears and then wake up on the floor. Could you then milk said cow? I doubt it."

"When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate."

"Gays should be fought against."

"[talking about word "homophobia":] I myself don´t like "gays" - and let me stress that I don't consider that word a synonym for "homosexual" - in the same way that I don't like Communists and Feminists as advocates of a harmful and stupid ideology. But have no fear of them."

"Once I appealed to distinguish words "gay" and "homosexual" (...). "Gayship" is a political homosexualism, a sort of left-wing ideology based on a bias against traditional lifestyle (...). Homosexualism is a sexual preference."

"I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind."

"Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth, a pint of plain is your only man."

"One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings."

"Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder."

"After a time," said old Mathers disregarding me, "I mercifully perceived the errors of my ways and the unhappy destination I would reach unless I mended them. I retired from the world in order to try to comprehend it and to find out why it becomes more unsavoury as the years accumulate on a man's body. What do you think I discovered at the end of my meditations?"

"Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable."

"I am completely half afraid to think."

"I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about."

"Is it life?" he answered, "I would rather be without it," he said, "for there is queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon."

"My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings."

"Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places."

"The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles."

""When things go wrong and will not come right,"

""Who is Fox?", I asked."

"You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"

"You told me what the first rule of wisdom is," I said. "What is the second rule?" "That can be answered," he said. "There are five in all. Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first...If you follow them," said the Sergeant, "you will save your soul and you will never get a fall on a slippy road."

"Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand."

"It cannot be too often repeated that I am not for sale. I was bought in 1921 and the transaction was final and conclusive."

"If Irish were to die completely, the standard of English here, both in the spoken and written word, would sink to a level probably as low as that obtaining in England and it would stop there only because it could go no lower."

"Moderation, we find, is an extremely difficult thing to get in this country."

"Often in the theatre I can hardly hear myself talking or assuring my doxy that so-and-so is the same fellow that played so-and-so in so-and-so, he's very good, he's a civil servant in the Department of Agriculture, I met a sister of his in Skerries, and so on. Actors should conduct themselves like the rest of us and practise the unobtrusive intonation of the gentleman."

"Some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses."

"Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill."

"The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at a crossroads."

"Is it life? I would rather be without it, for there is quare small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night's porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed jars and foreign bacon. Many a man has spent a hundred years trying to get the dimensions of it and when he understands it at last and entertains the certain pattern of it in his head, be the hokey he takes to his bed and dies. He dies like a poisoned sheepdog. There is nothing so dangerous you can't smoke it, nobody will give you tuppence halfpenny for the half of it, and it kills you in the wind-up. It is a quare contraption, very dangerous, a certain death-trap."

"England did nothing in the World Cup, why are they bringing books out? 'We got beat in the quarter-finals, I played like shit, here's my book'. Who wants to read that? I don't."

"It's alright, I'm not going to steal your breakfast you fat prick."

"You have to face facts. We have not brought quality in. One or two have done all right but not enough to take the team onto the next level. We can't gamble on players who have scored six goals in six games in the fucking Pontins League or in Belgium. I know a lot of the supporters are umming and ahhing about whether to buy their season tickets. They go out and work hard. It is a lot of money to buy a season ticket at our place and they are not getting value for money."

"I was able to string a sentence together and debate issues that went beyond Nuts magazine — and, yes, also capable at the time of mindless acts of violence."

"I've felt under threat this week. I've felt like something is going to happen to me. And I don't say that for anyone to feel sorry for me – I say that for people to understand the reality and the impact that hate speech has, the impact that racism has, the impact that sexism has, the impact that misogyny has on all of us females in the game, in sports broadcasting."

"Little has been heard, to date, from writers once happy to overlook a whole anthology of Barton attacks, including his stubbing a cigar out in another player’s eye, attacks on and off the pitch, and a six-month prison sentence (another was suspended) for common assault and affray. His supporters may even think it proves Barton’s “wokeism” point that, while sustained, occasionally criminal violence barely dented his prospects, some abusive tweets about prominent women will now have ended any he might have had in mainstream sport or cultural appreciation."

"Ik ben niet links, ik ben niet rechts. Ik ben recht-door-zee."

"Je bent geen ondernemer geworden om fulltime formulieren in te vullen."

"Die hbs-scholier die we hebben heeft goede ideeën, maar komt niet geloofwaardig over. Ik denk dat er eerst een wijf overheen moet voor hij volwassen wordt."

"Michelle Pfeiffer. Dat vind ik een lekker wijf. Maar ik moest genoegen nemen met Miss Gouda 1962."

"In order to reach universal suffrage we need to build trust."

"I should focus on other important issues like people's livelihoods and the economy."

"The life expectancy in Hong Kong is among the highest in the world … you can come to only one conclusion: we have the most environmentally friendly place for people, for executives, for Hong Kong people to live"

"All of the members of my new team have displayed in their work a strong sense of pragmatism that I promote. … While the backgrounds of principal officials are diverse, they all share a common commitment to our country, our territory and our people and agree with my governing philosophy."

"People can go to the extreme like what we saw during the Cultural Revolution. For instance, in China, when people take everything into their own hands, then you cannot govern the place. … [It] was the people taking power into their own hands. Now that is what you mean by democracy if you take it to the full swing."

"Fifty percent of people want to sleep with me, and the other 50 percent want to kill me."

"Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad serves up a triple scoop of crazy, sprinkled with crazy, and topped off with warm crazy sauce."

"For Dick Cheney, it must have felt just like any other day at the office: Folks who don't shave, don't bathe, and want him dead. Wow, feels just like back home!"

"Al Gore could really pollute a bathroom … Just look at the guy. If someone doesn't take away his pork 'n' beans, he's bound to get another one of those 'gut feelings' and mistake his own greenhouse gas production for science!"

"The Second Amendment was meant to give citizens the right to bear arms against the government, back when Uncle Sam's toys were as lame as yours… Handguns are sheer lunacy"

"Well I think we do have to define torture. One man’s torture is another man’s CIA’s sponsored swim lesson."

"I don't really pay much attention to it anymore. It's pretty ridiculous. I view it as a giant graffiti board for people with axes to grind — or for guys named Jimbo Wales who want to dump their girlfriends."

"While the Democratic-led congress hits a record low nine percent approval rating despite high pre-election hopes, the even further left-leaning embodiment of that epic failure is now shuffling around the globe, sending crowds into frenzies through speeches pimped out with eminently forgettable rhetoric that would make great political speechmakers like Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill scratch their heads."

"Never has outright racism been so exciting or so chic — both here in America and abroad! Kumbaya! In fact, a German paper called him “the black JFK”, which is an insult to the late President Kennedy, who -- again, leaving aside the blatant racism here — was nowhere near as far left as Obama."

"Sarkozy was elected last year by insisting on immigrants speaking French and insisting that they integrate into the French culture...Obama’s call for Americans to learn Spanish to accommodate the onslaught of Mexican immigrants makes the French government sound like Rush Limbaugh."

"She has very passionate opinions...she's articulate, intelligent, and we get a lot of favorable mail about her."

"Oh god, she is feminism's worst nightmare."

"I think they just thought she would be a good kind of lightning rod. We did one or two rehearsals, and I know for a fact that people liked her legs."

"I hope the next minister is not as radical as Marina. She was an obstacle to economic development in Brazil."

"The acute threat of the climate crisis, which has brought record heat to many South American countries, meant the summit had to be more than a show of unity; it needed to produce concrete and continuous results to ensure the Amazon did not reach a point where it starts to dry up and die off, which scientists have warned is drawing closer."

"The main reason is the decision of Lula to aim for zero deforestation. Since then, we have created new conservation units and indigenous territories that have produced some results … Now we need to move towards a new model of prosperity that is less predatory, less damaging to local people and the forest."

"It’s different now. The problem is more serious and more complex, but we have more experience and we know how to do it,”"

"Recognises the role of tropical forest conservention for biodiversity, carbon sequestion and cooling, as well as its importance for social and economic development""

"I said I would write a introduction on one condition, that you people don't send me emails telling me liking war is a sign of unhealthiness or some psychoanalytical crap. I'm a war nerd. A backseat sergeant. I know what I am."

"I live in Fresno which is a death sentence already."

"The best war is when you can hate both sides."

"That's a 7.76mm round, you idiots, if you fire it into the air it comes to earth you know not where, like on some little kid's soft-skulled head, and that's the end of the kid. They're too stupid to even figure that much out."

"Something you have to know about the US military is that it sucks at commando raids."

"One day it was lies, lies, lies, real old-school Saigon-style lies about how everything's fine...and then wham, we take Mazar-i-Sharif and it's a toboggan ride to Kabul."

"The First Law of Journalism: to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it."

"We all have to go one day, but pray God let it not be over Afghanistan. An unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheepshaggers and smugglers, who have furnished in their leisure hours some of the worst arts and crafts ever to penetrate the occidental world. I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it’s Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too."

"The travel writer seeks the world we have lost — the lost valleys of the imagination."

"A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience."

"No one believes for a moment the embargo will prompt the Iraqi people to rise against Saddam Hussein."

"There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend."

"No chord in populism reverberates more strongly than the notion that the robust common sense of an unstained outsider is the best medicine for an ailing polity. Caligula doubtless got big cheers from the plebs when he installed his horse as proconsul."

"Cockburn’s personal history links him to the politics of the Communist Party, and there are still moments in his writing – debating the number of people estimated to have perished in Stalin’s gulags, claiming that ‘the Brezhnev years were a Golden Age for the Soviet working class’, when aspects of his father’s convictions can be glimpsed."

"Alex kept the radical faith, steadily, constantly, going to the ends of the earth to cover the next story of revolt and revolution, going to the far corners of the United States to uncover the news that Americans were not taking it anymore. If a crowd had gathered, and if they were raising the red flag, or any flag of protest, that was enough for Alex. He would report their struggle, usually in The Nation, but also in the pages of The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, Esquire, the Village Voice and (for a brief period as remarkable as it was ironic) the Wall Street Journal."

"As remote as the rings of Saturn... A man with his stubby million-rand finger perennially prodding the public's pulse, his eyes constantly roving the horizons of the future, Kerzner has the power of a Prometheus unbound."

"The happy-go-lucky barefoot kid who loved rugby, ice-cream-and-hot-chocolate sauce, staying at home for a braai and the flieks grew up into an international rugby player, idol of millions and South African cult figure..."

"The voice (sometimes an ominous rumble that sounds as though he's been gargling with pebbles, sometimes the bliss of Bailey's Irish Cream swirling lazily about a fine crystal goblet) crescendos almost imperceptibly."

"His voice, like a malted milkshake marinated for more than seventy years, has a slightly monotonous lilt - rather like a Hindu chanting Bagavad Gita."

"the little roly-poly Russian-born rebel of the canvas."

"It is her total professionalism and perennial striving for perfection that elevated Moira from the merely blonde to the maxi-talented."

"The original of the yellow rose is clad (you've guessed it) in canary yellow. The lemon-meringue confection has been poured into yellow slacks and yellow shirt, an immaculate yellow-blonde barbie-doll with 'EFG- Follies-Girl' written all over her."

"A black-belt bullshitter"

"You'd have to be dead not to be impressed by his sincerity. But then didn't Oscar Wilde say say "The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity"."

"I'm impaled on the blue flames of his blowtorch eyes, you see."

"to miik the citizens to the extent that they start mooing, is contrary to improving living standards."

"A pervasive moral turpitude underlies South African society."

"I disapproved of the number of men she had traipsing into her bedroom and suggested she should have a turnstile on her bedroom door."

"Whatever award is given for libel, being cross-examined by you would not make it enough money."

"a small bewigged ferret"

"The facts of the matter are (that) I did not do any of the things of which I was accused by paid witnesses. But having said that, I'm not sitting here today pleading for the world to believe me because I've come to God. He knows what's in my heart; he knows the truth of the matter. And the witnesses who lied do as well."

"And I think that my whole life, looking back at it, I was so rooted in worldly things, in worldly values, fame, fashion and fortune and all the things that are just transient."

"That night I made copies of all the documents with shaking hands and gave them to a friend with contacts in the British secret services. I had a bitter taste in my mouth."

"Most of the time our discussions are political, because it's hard not to be political in this country (not like in Britain, where you can ignore the rather sedate way everything's going downhill)."

"But despite the fact that everyone thinks that I'm an IFP member, I do not have any political affiliations. I support Buthelezi the man because he makes me believe that heroes still exist."

"Dressing with style is akin to issuing a manifesto; dressing fashionably is like signing a petition."

"I had an idea of her humour from her writing and I'd always appreciated that very English brand of wit. She has a razor-sharp mind... Jani is a very sensitive and emotional person. I don't think I've got the same fine sensitivity or compassion that she has. But finding ourselves on the same wavelength as Christians is more profound and meaningful to me than anything else. Over the years we've warmed towards each other as Christians. That bond, apart from the friendship, rises above all different political ideas. It's more of a spiritual link."

"Your piece on me acted like a bicycle pump and I mooned around for ages, smiling foolishly and cannoning off the wallls."

"[P]leated Trixi Schober trousers in faux-poor crushed linen, jewelled sweaters produced in Mariucca Mandelli's unmistakable hand, a sculpted Karl Lagerfeld handbag, scarves and gloves by Nanni."

"She is not destructive - but she does have a particular facility for puncturing pomposity."

"The only girl who ever knocked me out."

"I have come to value liberated minds as the supreme good of life on earth."

"Nie Kolumb pierwszy odkrył Amerykę, ale pierwszy ją opatentował."

"Współczesne cywilizacje są mocno skomputerroryzowane."

"Nienawiść jest jak Hydra, im więcej głów ścinasz, tym bardziej ją wzmacniasz."

"Niewolnik marzy o wolności, człowiek wolny o bogactwie, bogacz o władzy, a władca o wolności."

"The tragedy of a thoughtless man is not that he doesn't think, but that he thinks that he's thinking."

"Never curse an illness; better ask for health."

"Man invented the car to comfortably sit in jams."

"Women are beautiful in the light of the day, but are even more so in the shadows of the night."

"Man invented clothing to cover the superficial and to discover the inside."

"The first true love is always the last one."

"If you do not want it to rain, always carry an umbrella."

"A woman withers when she is watered only with tears."

"Politics is a great art. It succeeds at convincing the people that they have to pay for what has been stolen from them."

"I was brought up to believe that cricket is the most important activity in men's lives, the most important thread in the fabric of the cosmos."

"Before we were old enough to practise at the nets with the Burslem men, we played most of our cricket on waste land that had been trampled flat by the clogs and boots of generations of miners."

"Far from being pro-Unionist, I do not want Ireland to be part of the United Kingdom. But, as a Wolfe Tone republican, I feel I have a firm duty to defend the rights of Protestants and Dissenters to do their own thing until such time as we can persuade them their future is in a federal Ireland."

"I am not a nationalist, I am a Wolfe Tone Republican. In pursuit of that ideal I have been forced to continually shift positions, much like a man in a cinema who keeps changing his seat, but only so he can get a clean view of the same film. And the title of the film, of which I never tire, is The Future Irish Republic."

"The automatic assumption that everything a unionist does is wrong is not good for us. Like, how could everything that unionists do be wrong? I mean, they're not a special people. They're not a kind of special bad people."

"Above all, most Irish nationalists entertain the fiction of Irish exceptionalism, the false conviction that Ireland suffered more under British colonialism than any other comparable people. Let me be clear. I am not saying something nasty did not happen in the historical woodshed. What I am saying is that what happened was neither as nasty as we believe, nor did it last as long as we believe, nor was it all the work of some beastly British soldier passing by."

"George W. Bush will surely deserve that woolliest of all peace prizes, the Nobel."

"We should never go to war unless we have been attacked or are under direct, immediate threat of attack. Never. And never again."

"Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose."

"Food has been my career, my hobby, and, it must be said, my escape."

"I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea."

"Eating, and that feel of food in the mouth, is all part of comfort and affection and warmth, and I think that a lot of the reason that I turned to food was because I was actually quite a lonely child."

"Good kitchens are not about size; they are about ergonomics and light."

"It is the deep, salty stickiness of food that intrigues me more than any other quality."

"Well let's face it, who on earth besides antique dealers and gay couples actually still give dinner parties?"

"Almost anything is edible with a dab of French mustard on it."

"I have never eaten a boiled egg, but I have had a soldier or two."

"The (TV) Cultura lost his hand in an area that was the leader, tried to reinvent the wheel three times. The 'Rá-Tim-Bum', a project extremely daring and successful, was abandoned to turn the 'Castelo (Rá-Tim-Bum)', which was also very good. There had to stop. Instead of continuing, preferred to create 'Ilha Rá-Tim-Bum', which failed."

"Luiza (his oldest daughter) expressed this option in college. At the time, talked with her and school counselors. It was important to let the choice be hers and that any pressure was accompanied by homophobic colleagues. Fortunately, there was no question about their most serious option . That, remember, is personal."

"The accounts that history presents have to be paid. Past has to be reconciled with present in the life of a nation. History is an insistent force: the past is what put us where we are. the past cannot be put behind until it is settled with."

"America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of it's exhausted ideas."

"For four hundred years European civilization has dominated the world - for better or for worse. It is convenient, and flattering, for Americans to assume that this is all over; but it very rash to do so."

"Europeans believe in democracy - or, at least, in republican government - but they have considered the alternatives, and continue to do so, and that scandalizes Americans."

"We Americans really seem to be the only truly non-socialist economy on earth."

"The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer."

"The moral spectacle of capitalism still offends, as does American capitalism's implacable insistence that the market determine value even in the political, intellectual, and artistic spheres."

"But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think."

"The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years."

"These choices by small countries are vital for them, but may be more momentous than commonly understood for others as well, including the major powers, who presumptuously believe they are in control of events."

"One cannot say that it will never happen again, or that it cannot happen."

"The achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well."

"Foreign policy deals across time as well as space."

"It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant."

"A great nation's foreign policy involves power, money, trade, oil and arms, but it proeeds from ideas."

"The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old."

"Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion."

"The frontier that remains is is the interior one, the most forbidding and mysterious frontier."

"I write exactly as I speak, so therefore I would not say any writer influenced me at all."

"I don't say I was 'proceeding down a thoroughfare', I say I 'walked down the road'. I don't say I 'passed a hallowed institute of learning', I say I 'passed a school'. You don't wear all your jewellery at once. You're much more believable if you talk in your own voice."

"It's like if you don't go to a dance you can never be rejected but you'll never get to dance either."

"(A) writer, a man I loved and he loved me and we got married and it was great and is still great. He believed I could do anything, just as my parents had believed all those years ago, and I started to write fiction and that took off fine. And he loved Ireland, and the fax was invented so we writers could live anywhere we liked, instead of living in London near publishers."

"Suddenly they asked me, as only the French would, ‘Madame, what is your philosophy of life?’ What a cosmic question, but I had to answer, and answer quickly, because it was live. So I said, in French, ‘I think that you’ve got to play the hand that you’re dealt and stop wishing for another hand.’"

"I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It's the only book I didn't finish. I couldn't get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance."

"I often wonder that if I had met Hitler, I reckon I might have found some streak of decency in him."

"On my 100th birthday, piloting Gordon and myself into the side of a mountain."

"She had time for everybody. Perhaps because her stories came from all of us and for all of us."

"She rearranged a whole wall of books so it was completely full of Irish writers. She didn't look like she was any trouble so no one caught her."

"She had that great gift of making you feel life was worth living. A very, very special person."

"She was charming, intelligent, warm, generous in her time, with her effort, with her work. I just had the greatest of respect for her because she suffered badly from arthritis, and she had a lot of pain, and she never complained, you know."

"Christmas is over and Business is Business."

"There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country really needs is a good five-cent nickel"

"The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time."

"When the political columnists say 'Every thinking man' they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to 'Every intelligent voter' they mean everybody who is going to vote for them."

"Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody."

"Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead centre of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net."

"I do not remember any other term when the force that had captured the political power in this country had become so vulgar as it is today, so corrupt, and so hypocritical; when the legal system had been so downtrodden, deteriorated, collapsed and turned into a means of cruelty."

"They were eyes, that while gazing on the world Rendered it brilliant with meaning They were eyes, that embraced me with glances They were eyes, for which I now hopelessly long"

"I've learned some things from having lived: If you're alive, experience one thing with all your power Your beloved should be worn out from being kissed And you should drop exhausted from the smelling of a flower"

"A person can gaze at the sky for hours Can gaze for hours at a bird, a child, the sea To live on the earth is to become part of it To strike down roots that won't pull free"

"To your utmost, listen to every beautiful song As though filling all the self with sound and melody One should plunge head-first into life As one dives from a cliff into the emerald sea"

"Distant lands should draw you, people you don't know To read every book, know other's lives, you should be burning You shouldn't exchange for anything the pleasure of a glass of water No matter how much the joy, your life should be filled with yearning"

"I've learned some things from having lived: If you're alive, experience largely, merge with rivers, heavens, cosmos For what we call living is a gift given to life And life is a gift bestowed upon us"

"Death, one experiences alone Love is a two-person thing"

"Gulls into the water, women proudly into the bazaars I was going to write a poem, I was stifling, fed up with old things Eat, my mother says, but they're all things I've grown accustomed to, in the end. Like Camus and — I don’t know — people like that, I'm cracking up Everything will begin when it untangles itself from your hair"

"Is the truth of tablecloths to be spread? How awful always to take refuge in known words A person should let himself go."

"Writing poems is perhaps the loveliest deception Later they'll make a picture or something, then go and drink wine"

"I'd make me into a brand new sailor if I were God Maybe there were new things over there It comes from within me to write as though rabid, I'm hungry, do you understand Let the doctors call it what they will Who can know anything best of all What does it mean to know anything best Which religion doesn't grow old"

"I want to write poetry, I'm bored, disgusted by my habits If I stop thinking and put my hands down perhaps I will have much to say I'm scurrying to the attic like a solitary bug Before you become old and ugly, I must kiss you on the nose"

"Once more in that hour of darkness In dark black waters they arise Dark songs pass before their eyes They lie awake gazing into darkness"

"In the most affirming places of their love Suddenly they grew tired, out of breath Little by little they felt the death Of some places left in darkness"

"The poet should be responsible to the poem."

"A poem is a living organism."

"Creativity is a hidden gem. Education is needed to uncover it."

"Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful."

"The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before."

"Hours and hours of insanity and escape. The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather. Plastic bags caught on the gusts of summer wind. Old domino players sat in the courtyard, playing underneath the flying litter. The sound of the plastic bags was like rifle fire. If you watched the rubbish for a while you could tell the exact shape of the wind. Perhaps in a way it was alluring, like little else around it: whole, bright, slapping curlicues and large figure eights, helixes and whorls and corkscrews. Sometimes a bit of plastic caught against a pipe or touched the top of the chain-link fence and backed away gracelessly, like it had been warned. The handles came together and the bag collapsed. There were no tree branches to be caught on. One boy from a neighboring flat stuck a lineless fishing pole out the window but he didn't catch any. The bags often stayed up in one place, as if they were contemplating the whole gray scene, and then would take a sudden dip, a polite curtsy, and away."

"Grow up, brother. Pack your bags, go somewhere you matter. They deserve nothing. They're not Magdalenes. You're just a bum among them. You're looking for the poor man within? Why don't you humble yourself at the feet of the rich for once? Or does your God just love useless people?"

"If you think you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures."

"I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student — thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories."

"We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant."

"You know, when you're young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there. The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can't hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again."

"Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get."

"There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream."

"I knew then that it would end badly, her and Corrigan, these children. Someone or other was going to get torn asunder. And yet why shouldn't they fall in love, if even just for a short while? Why shouldn't Corrigan live his life in the body that was hurting him, giving up in places? Why shouldn't he have a moment of release from this God of his? It was a torture shop for him, worrying about the world, having to deal with intricacies when what he really wanted was to be ordinary and do the simple thing.Yet nothing was simple, certainly not simplification. Poverty, chastity, obedience — he had spent his life in fealty to them, but was unarmed when they turned against him."

"We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable."

"She recognized a new depth in him, a candor. The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. War was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple - hate your enemy, know nothing of him. It was, he claimed, the most un-American of wars, no idealism behind it, only about defeat."

"Death, the greatest democracy of them all. The world's oldest complaint. Happens to us all. Rich and poor. Fat and thin. Fathers and daughters. Mothers and sons."

"There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it's the last we'll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times."

"At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign."

"You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lift miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day untouched, some old, lost sweet-tasting time. But there it was again, the girl's spreading bloodstain."

"The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth."

"Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. There wasn't much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar."

"Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. even of people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, he said, it had to be fought for."

"Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance."

"He believed in walking beautifully, elegantly. It had to work as a kind of faith that he would get to the other side. He had fallen once while training - once exactly, so he felt it couldn't happen again, it was beyond possibility. A single flaw was necessary anyway. In any work of beauty there had to be one small thread left hanging."

"Everything had purpose, signal, meaning."

"The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond equilibrium. He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake."

"It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him. The wire was about pain too: it would always be there, jutting into his feet, the weight of the bar, the dryness of the throat, the throb of his arms, but the joy was losing the pain so that it no longer mattered. So too with his breathing. He wanted his breath to enter the wire so that he was nothing. This sense of losing himself. Every nerve. Every cuticle. He hit it on the towers. The logic became unfixed. It was the point where there was no time. The wind was blowing and his body could have experienced it years in advance."

"He wondered if that was what the moment of death was about, the noise of the world and then ease away from it."

"The theater began shortly after lunch. His fellow judges and court officers and reporters and even the stenographers were already talking about it as if it were another of those things that just happened in the city. One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief."

"He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn't care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NE YORK FUCKIN' CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would."

"New York kept going forward precisely because it didn't give a good goddamn about what it left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey."

"A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little niche and make it your own. You ride out the time as best you can."

"The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own."

"I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it."

"He told me once that there is no better faith than a wounded faith and sometimes I wonder if that is what he was doing all along - trying to wound his faith in order to test it - and I was just another stone in the way of his God."

"Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight."

"People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time - but even on the best day nobody's perfect."

"Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place."

"Sometimes we walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin."

"Crowded - feel free to speak- See Dumb Man."

"Alliteration the mind - Temple, life is a honeymoon vernal song on the humble bee's lips, Alcoholic realized in the mustard flower, as like friend ."

"The dog may be man Horse, donkey, too But the bull- Man can not Anytime."

"Unless the Social System does not come till then the financial crisis will remain as it exist in the present system for Dalits."

"blogging over serious aspects can really affect the changes. As for e.g. there was an incident of 26/11 terrorist attack which was seriously taken up by the bloggers and the blog world and bloggers (specially Hindi bloggers) seriously expressed their grave concern over it and finally the result is in front of you. Like wise there is another example of homosexuality last year. When live in relationship was being promoted. Then also the blog world took up that matter seriously and the result is before you."

"If a Bloggers dies without transforming his/her knowledge to the new generation, the knowledge is meaningless.If an example if a witch could not transform her knowledge to anybody, she makes a hole where she dies."

"Home ought to be our clearing house, the place from which we go forth lessoned and disciplined, and ready for life."

"I write what I would like to read – what I think other women would like to read. If what I write makes a woman in the Canadian mountains cry and she writes and tells me about it, especially if she says ‘I read it to Tom when he came in from work and he cried too,’ I feel I have succeeded."

"What is enough? Are there enough trees here? As always, it seems that, the more I can distinguish my true needs from my wants, the more of a shock it is to realize how little is enough."

"Today in America—the child of European imperialism—a new revolution is rising. It is the revolution of our time... and offers the only possible escape for mankind today."

"The United States is the only country where these revolutions are simultaneously in progress and organically linked in such a way as to constitute a single revolution."

"Similarly, societies where news is censored cannot enjoy the luxury of false objectivity because they do not have the true variety. In free civilizations, false objectivity must be fought by true objectivity, not by some alien bureaucracy. Prejudiced history is eliminated, or at least combated, by serious history, and corrupt journalism can only be defeated by honest journalism, not by a government commission whose first act may be to distribute some secret subsidies."

"Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."

"Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is working to destroy it."

"It is clear that international law must evolve, even if it will be difficult to find the new and appropriate notions that will allow it to … However, it is unlikely that we will ever be capable of building a world that is qualitatively better than we ourselves are."

"The principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation. To travesty the United States as a repressive, unjust, racist—almost fascist—society was a way of proclaiming: look what happens when liberalism is implemented!"

"America is the object of their loathing because, for a half-century or more, she has been the most prosperous and creative capitalist society on earth. Ultimately it is liberal democracy - or quite simply liberty itself - that they are eager to destroy, even though they are among its foremost beneficiaries, being free to travel anywhere, anytime in order to hatch their plots. If their diktats were carried out, if frontier barriers were reestablished everywhere, with passports and visas even for tourists, there could have been no Seattle and no Goteborg."

"Since no example of Leninist socialism is other than totalitarian and bureaucratic, one wonders how the doctrinaire ideologists can dismiss so disdainfully those who point out that the promise of socialism in freedom, while surely praiseworthy, remains a promise only, not something experienced in reality. The utopia of socialism with a human face has been crushed everywhere even before it could be born. How distressing that becoming humane, which should be the least we could expect from a regime dedicated to liberating humanity, should present for socialism a problem as impossible as squaring the circle."

"The idea that a culture can preserve its originality by barricading itself against foreign influences is an old illusion that has always produced the opposite of the desired result. Isolation breeds sterility. It is the free circulation of cultural products and talents that allows each society to perpetuate and renew itself."

"Not just songs by Madonna and action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; it includes 1,700 symphony orchestras, opera attended by 7.5 million people every year, and museums that are visited by 500 million annually, almost all American museums, where entrance is quite often free, owe their existence and funding to private sponsors."

"There is a big difference between being anti-American and being critical of the United States. Once again: critiques are appropriate and necessary, provided that they rest on facts and address real abuses, real errors and real excesses -- without deliberately losing sight of America's wise decisions, beneficent interventions and salutary policies. But critiques of this kind -- balanced, fair and well-founded are hard to find, except in America herself: in the daily press in weekly news magazines, on television and radio, and in highbrow monthly journals, which are more widely read than their equivalents in Europe."

"Anti-Americanism thus defined is less a popular prejudice than a parti pris of the political, cultural and religious elites."

"The strange thing is that it's always in Europe that dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up, yet it's always America that is "fascist"."

"What picture of American society is likely to be imprinted on the consciousness of average Europeans? Given what they read or hear every day from intellectuals and politicians, they can hardly have any choice in the unpleasant particulars, especially if they happen to be French. The picture repeatedly sketched for them is as follows: American society is entirely ruled by money. No other value, whether familial, moral, religious, civic, cultural, professional, or ethical has any potency in itself. Everything in America is a commodity, regarded and used exclusively for its material value. A person is judged solely by the worth of his bank account. Every U.S. President has been in the pockets of the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the agricultural lobby, or the financial manipulators of Wall Street. America is the "jungle" par excellence of out-of-control, "savage" capitalism, where the rich are always becoming richer and fewer, while the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous. Poverty is the dominant social reality in America. Hordes of famished indigents are everywhere, while luxurious chauffeured limousines with darkened windows glide through the urban wilderness."

"Poverty and inequality like this should cause Europeans to cringe in horror, especially since (we have it on good authority) there is no safety net in America, no unemployment benefits, no retirement, no assistance for the destitute--not the slightest bit of social solidarity. In the U.S. "only the most fortunate have the right to medical care and to grow old with dignity," as one writer recently put it in Libération. University courses are reserved only for those who can pay, which partly explains the "low level of education" in the benighted US."

"Europeans firmly believe these sorts of caricatures--because they are repeated every day by the elites."

"This is the message of critics not only in Europe, but also in the United States itself, where anti-Americanism continues to prosper among university, journalistic, and literary elites. But in Europe, these ideological reasons for blaming America first are multiplied by simple jealousy of American power. The current American "hyperpower" is the direct consequence of European powerlessness, both past and present. The United States fills a void caused by our inadequacies in capability, thinking, and will to act."

"Strangely, it is always America that is described as degenerate and 'fascist', while it is solely in Europe that actual dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up."

"Shortly after 9/11 a French spokesman for the activist group ATTAC quoted the adage: "He who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind." French prime minister Lionel Jospin seemed to be pointing in this direction when he asked, "What lesson are the Americans going to draw from what has happened?" The lesson, Jospin indicated, should be for the U.S. to moderate her unilateralism. For Cardinal Karl Lehmann, president of the German Bishops' Conference, the lesson to be drawn from terrorism was that "the West must not seek to dominate the rest of the world.""

"Soon, many European elites insinuated that the jihadist attacks had some moral justification. These anti-American views began to circulate well before the campaign to dislodge the Taliban kicked off on October 7. The bombing which became the most frequently invoked reason to take sides against the U.S. had not yet even begun."

"The success and originality of American integration stem precisely from the fact that immigrants' descendants can perpetuate their ancestral cultures while thinking of themselves as Americans in the fullest sense, sharing basic ideals across racial and ethnic barriers. In France, the characteristic attitude of newcomers from North Africa, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa is predominantly one of alienation, confrontation, rejection, and hatred."

"As immigration trends suggest, anti-Americanism is not deeply rooted as a popular prejudice. In Europe, anti-Americanism is much more a hobgoblin of the political, cultural, and religious elites. According to a SOFRES survey of May 2000, only 10 percent of French feel dislike for the U.S. After September 11, according to another poll, 52 percent of French people interviewed said they had always felt warmly toward the U.S., against 32 percent who said the opposite. Historian Michel Winock concludes that "anti-Americanism is not an attitude of the average French person; it is typical of a certain segment of the elites.""

"[Revel] ...described the United States as the most eligible prototype nation for world revolution. Real revolutionary activity, he noted, consists of transforming reality, that is, in making reality conform more closely to one's ideal. When we speak of "revolution" we must necessarily speak of something that cannot be conceived or understood within the context of old ideas. The stuff of revolution, and its first success, must be the ability to innovate. In that sense, there is more revolutionary spirit in the United States today, even on the Right, than elsewhere on the Left. The relative freedom in the United States would make it possible for such a revolution to occur bloodlessly, Revel said. If that happened, and if one political civilization were exchanged for another, as seemed to be happening, the impact might be felt worldwide by osmosis. This radical transformation would need the simultaneous occurrence of smaller revolutions—in politics, society, international and interracial relations, cultural values, and technology and science."

"Like Transcendentalism, Revel's revolution would encompass "the liberation of the creative personality and the awakening of personal initiative" as opposed to the closed horizons of more repressive societies. The perturbation would come from the privileged classes, he said, because that is the way of revolutions. They are launched by those disenchanted with the culture's ultimate reward system. If a new prototype of society is to emerge, rather than a coup d'etat, dialogue and debate must occur at the highest levels."

"First, anti-Americanism is used as a reflection against which to define French identity. For instance, the French critique of the failures and hypocrisies of American multiculturalism reflect back on the idealized French republican model based on assimilation, integration, and equality. Moreover, anti-Americanism can be mobilized by political entrepreneurs to legitimize certain policies, especially status quo policies. For instance, when politicians discuss implementing affirmative action, opponents of the reform immediately invoke the American model to ensure rejection of the new policy. Similarly, Jean-Francois Revel, one of the few anti-anti-American intellectuals in France, has argued that “the principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation”"

"I read everything he writes."

"What exactly do the intellectuals want out of their Rococo Marxist mental acrobatics? Is it change they want, change for all the para-proletariats whose ideological benefactors they proclaim themselves to be? Of course not. Actual change would involve irksome toil. So what do they want? It's a simple business, at bottom. All the intellectual wants, in his heart of hearts, is to hold on to what was magically given to him one shining moment a century ago. He asks for nothing more than to remain aloof, removed, as Revel once put it, from the mob, the philistines . . . "the middle class.""

"Despite their old marketing campaign, Apple is not the company "for the rest of us." Apple's primary goal is meeting Apple's goals, often without regard to who is hurt along the way."

"The only reason the Mac has been such a low priority to Apple is that it's been such a low priority to Apple."

"America has no obligation to let you bring products into this nation without tariff or impost while you exploit the existence of authoritarian governments and environmental arbitrage. A 100% tariff on all of Apple's foreign-produced or assembled products should make the decision easy ..."

"There are many who claim that Apple is not a "one-man" company. Baloney. Apple was always a one-man company. Most firms that pull off the sort of "flash and jizz" game that Apple has are -- it's just reality. But now that's gone and (literally) eaten by worms."

"[Ford] has publicly declared that fellating employee egos takes precedence over enterprise data security. A company that takes this position deserves what befalls them as a consequence."

"What makes anyone think [Apple Watch is] going to "disrupt" anything, other than the careers of the people who planned and executed that abortion?"

"There are two problems with Apple Pay — and both are problematic. The first is that not everyone has an [i]OS device, or one that supports it. And not everyone ever will, despite the wet dreams of the entire Dallas Cowboys team blowing Tim Cook nightly that dance in his head."

"Ya gotta be fruity to carry that crap [an iPhone] around in your pocket."

"The premise of $600+ mobile device sales as a mainstream purchase by ordinary Americans, never mind overpriced $300 plastic-cased watches, appears to be a fantasy dream. The iFemineProduct has quite-clearly peaked and started its decline ..."

"Many of those who read history at Delhi in the mid-1970s and later, still bear the ugly scars inflicted by the thought police of sarkari Marxism. 'There are two interpretations of history', a leading representative of the Red Cretin Brigade used to inform his students casually, 'the bourgeois interpretation and the Marxist interpretation, and the Marxist interpretation is the correct one.' ...Whereas the British Marxists established their reputation by crafting their radical concerns their Indian counterparts took cheeky short cuts. it may also explain why substantive research on Indian history has increasingly become the prerogative of British, and a few American and Australian universities. The presiding deities of Indian historiography have meanwhile devoted themselves to writing politically correct text books that present history as chapters of received wisdom. They have also drafted resolutions for the Indian History Congress and written articles in the press on the Ayodhya issue."

"It is one thing of offer, as Mr. Advani has consistently done, a powerful critique of the prevailing political culture. But the problem lies in designing an alternative... How, for example, does the concept of Hindu Rashtra...square with the notion of 'justice for all and appeasement of none? The campaign for the Ram Mandir, while important in symbolic terms, is unlikely to be a substitute for a comprehensive, alternative philosophy. Having tapped the reservoirs of anti-status quo, the BJP is unlikely to progress if its critique stops at the secular-communal issue. Mr. Advani has struck a powerful blow at the shibboleths of Nehruvian consensus; his successor will be frittering away the advantages if a simultaneous assault is not launched on the other article of the reviled faith - socialism."

"Some people (cabal members) who thought that they had a monopoly over truth and over wisdom found that the masses didn’t agree with them…These people are now confused …and want to say that they’re the repository of the entire truth and everything else is false consciousness."

"An atmosphere of hate was systematically built up. The whole purpose of it was to suggest that only one community has a veto over decision-making in India"

"In 2008 or 2009, I approached a leading publisher with a proposal to write a political study of the Modi phenomenon. Their editor got back saying that the staff was horrified at the very idea that a sympathetic study of Modi should even be considered."

"I don’t think that this arrest will either frighten or silence Arnab Goswami. It will enhance his appeal and make the Shiv Sena and Congress appear ridiculous."

"Whatever the reasons behind dubbing Modi an international pariah and the subject of a diplomatic boycott involving both the US and the European Union member states, one conclusion was inescapable: it was a brazen attempt to pronounce judgment on the internal affairs of a sovereign country. Modi, after all, hadn’t been held guilty [of] "mass murder" by an Indian criminal court. Indeed, there were no charges against him then or subsequently. Yes, the Gujarat leader had been pilloried mercilessly by both his political opponents and the human rights lobby that has formidable international links. A political aversion to Modi was translated into the diplomatic censure of a man who held a [c]onstitutional position. It was a step too far and one that didn't lend itself to an easy U-turn."

"For them, flaunting an anti-Modi badge ensured privileged access into the corridors of UPA power. And there's no denying that until at least a year ago, the US remained the flavour of the season for both Congress ministers and a supplicant media."

"[...] France [...] too had invested heavily in the Congress establishment and in the skewed advice of its so-called India experts."

"Today, the countries that had kept up a civilised relationship with Modi despite the US’s strictures—these include Japan, Singapore, Canada, Australia, Israel[,] and even China—are happy with the knowledge that their transition to a new regime will be extra smooth. Nor will the others who changed their tune midway feel disadvantaged. It is only the US that invested politically in the witch-hunt against Modi that feels seriously threatened."

"Having exposed its fangs publicly, Washington will not readily admit it miscalculated horribly. If Modi comes to power, a working relationship with the US Embassy will be established. But let us have no doubts that the repair job will also be accompanied by surreptitious attempts to undermine him."

"The US hates having to admit it was ever wrong."

"It’s true. This violence was unexpected. Nobody expected it. There is victory and defeat in elections, but the way violence started right from the counting centers has never been seen before. To date, this has not been seen anywhere in India. The BJP workers or even the organization were not prepared for this level of violence, this allegation is absolutely true. There have been attacks on our workers. Close to 50,000 workers had to be homeless. Close to 20 people were murdered. During all this, our organization could not help its workers in the slightest."

"The violence that started on the afternoon of May 2, 2021, had only one objective – to break the backbone of the BJP organization. BJP got 38% votes, the Majority of the Hindu vote was in favor of the BJP, which means the support of a large percentage of voters was with us. Therefore, the aim was to create such an environment using violence that in the future, support for BJP should be eliminated, and the backbone of the organization should be broken. The fear should be such that the supporters of the BJP do not come out of the house and the same thing happened."

"It cannot be denied that this is happening in Bengal. 30% of the total population there are Muslims (some say 23%, some 25%, but 30% if the voting figures are to be considered). The border districts adjoining Bangladesh, such as Nadia, Dinajpur, Murshidabad, Malda, and a large part of South 24 Parganas, all have become completely Muslim dominated."

"If we look at the political aspect of the demographic change in West Bengal, today there is a political veto of the Muslim community. This means that it is the Muslim community that decides who will rule, and how. This also means that Mamata Banerjee may be ruling, there may be 10 more Bengali Hindu ministers, but the one who will be driving them from the backroom will be the Muslim community."

"The media in Bengal today is not free media, even though there is no gun trained on the media there. These people do not hide the truth or news because of the fear of guns, but they hide it because of money. The government gives money to media houses, and according to the government, the news is reported. This practice has far-reaching consequences. Suppose a historian is collecting information about Bengal violence in the future, what will he find? When he looks at the current news and newspapers, he will think ‘nothing major happened, some minor incidents happened.’"

"This is the state of the Bengali media. There is no free media, in fact, it is not even the media, they are just typists for the state government."

"Every single leader here, I can take to The Hague. Mark my word. I have it right here! And I am saying, Come, baby come!"

"I’m vying as an independent candidate in Nairobi City County. I’m not vying as a representative of any ethnic group. I’m going to be the Governor of all patriotic Kenyans. I’m going to be the Governor of all tribes, religions, faiths, races and political persuasions."

"Nairobians only had crooks as candidate in 2013. Voters did not have leaders of integrity to choose from. In 2017, they will have me."

"In other words, the inept and malicious propaganda against me will not work. Money has never won any elections. Cartel propaganda fueled by evil, lies and malice will not emerge victorious against righteousness, integrity and vision. I represent hope and a fully liberated and cleaned up Nairobi while the cartels are determined to protect and fortify the rotten, corrupt and exploitative status quo."

"The provision of basic services to the people is not a privilege. Nor is it a charitable act. The people already paid for the services via the high taxes."

"I've been hearing that from envious people since I was in standard 1. Between 1971 when I started Primary School to when I completed by Bar Exams, I became number 1 numerous times and whenever that happened, those who had performed dismally would shout "Pride Comes Before A Fall!" Mediocre performers have continued to shout the same thing at me ever since. The good news is that green envy has never sabotaged the progress of any determined organic intellectual and visionary leader. So, yours are like the croaks of toads in a pond. They will never deter the Lion from drinking water."

"The ability to write reflects on one’s capacity to think clearly."

"I have work to do, and I am afraid not to do it."

"I tended to read whatever was in the house, which meant that I read a lot of odd stuff. Who was that guy that used to write about men's clubs all the time? John O'Hara. It was Mars for me"

"John O'Hara was a terrible bore as a young man—always looking for a fight, and making sure he never found one."

"I have a dream where society will replace guns with dictionaries."

"We're all surrounded by words like air, and we all need them even though they are often invisible, just like air."

"English never met a word it didn't like."

"There are exotic species of words jumping out inviting me to play. I weave them into a theme, a garland of words."

"Browsing the OED is the idea of a perfect day for me."

"A large vocabulary is like an artist having a big palette of colors. We don't have to use all the colors in a single painting, but it helps to be able to find just the right shade when we need it."

"The best way to enrich vocabulary is organically, by coming across words in their natural habitat, taking the time to learn about them, their histories, and making lifelong friends with them."

"A right word is the most direct route between two minds."

"[T]hat's how a language grows. Old words die - or take on a new life. New words appear. Language wordstock is replenished, refreshed, and the language remains vibrant and serviceable, ready to describe new concepts, ideas, and objects. Many language purists object to this way of growth. But we have to remember that just as yesterday's liberal is often tomorrow's conservative, in many cases, what was considered slang in the past, eventually acquires respectability."

"A lex icon."

"A word in the head is worth two in the book."

"For as long as I can recall, I enjoyed reading. I literally read books from cover to cover. Then I started wondering where words come from. Who made them up? Who said that that opening in a wall was to be called a window? Then I discovered that each word comes with a biography. These words have fascinating stories to tell, if only we take the time to listen. For example, the word window comes from Old Norse in which it meant wind's eye. How much more poetic can you get?"

"If you speak English, you speak at least a part of more than a hundred languages."

"Overall, the universe's apostrophe store stays in balance. It seems our linguistic world was intelligently designed -- for every gratuitous apostrophe there's an instance where it's omitted."

"All the life's wisdom can be found in anagrams. Anagrams never lie."

"If you torture words enough, they'll confess to anything."

"Like a human being, each word has a story. To understand a word, we need to learn where it was born, what paths it took to reach where it is today and how it has changed along the way."

"Do the best job I can, not hurt our fellow beings on this planet, that's my religion."

"When life gives you lemons make melons."

"The verb "fuck" has been a part of the language since at least early 1500s. The actual practice, far longer. So, no need to be embarrassed of either."

"Q: What language is not written in French? A: Sanskrit. In French, it's known as sanskrit or sanscrit, which you can interpret as sans (without) + écrit (written) https://www.facebook.com/wordsmithorg/posts/10157813707206840"

"Scientifically speaking, an overweight person is more attractive than a skinny one. Newton's Law of Gravitation."

"Eyes are verbs that conjugate the emotions."

"thumb|People travel. Words travel. People settle in new lands and so do words. Did I hear someone say they wanted to make walls, close off people from one another? Here’s to more travel, more mixing, more migration, more import and export, and more sweetness in our lives!People travel. Words travel. People settle in new lands and so do words. Did I hear someone say they wanted to make walls, close off people from one another? Here’s to more travel, more mixing, more migration, more import and export, and more sweetness in our lives!"

"Only Anu Garg, the founder of Wordsmith.org, can make word facts this much fun."

"Anu Garg triggers the kind of passionate reaction that actors, authors and memoirists would die for."

"Garg works in the great tradition of Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis... Garg, however, is more fun."

"AWADies will be familiar with Anu Garg's refreshing approach to words: words are fun and they have fascinating histories."

"A world without problems is an illusion, so is a world without solutions."

"The German poet Novalis said that the eye is a ‘superficial’ organ. That is indeed partly true. I will even add that it is an external organ: the eye with which we see the world is a part of the world itself. As soon as we open the eye, whup, the world pops in it!"

"The greatest optical illusion of all is to believe that an image has only one interpretation."

"Life, like art, is purposeless and unpredictable. That’s what makes it beautiful and rare! In life, we are given the choice between three paths: utopia, illusion or nonsense. The funny thing is, none of us get the joke."

"Life is a space between two illusions: Birth and Death..."

"Are the eyes an open door to the world, as poets say? Well, honestly, not really. The fact is, we see the world through a pair of tiny peepholes, the pupils of our eyes. Our brain functions as a highly creative ‘camera obscura’ – the forerunner of the modern photographic camera, named from the Latin for dark room."

"Your eyes – those incredible jelly balls beneath your forehead – capture everything around you. They are sense organs allowing you to see, and they give more information about your surroundings than any of the other four senses: hearing, taste, touch and smell."

"Colors are ghosts, they only start to exist when light is perceived on the retina as a stimulus and is processed into color perception in our brain."

"We long for a technological world, while keeping the natural aspect of our environment; we want the progress, while maintaining the traditions; we want organization while preserving individual freedom; we produce at a large scale while looking for unique products; we want clearness in our relationships, while we like to play with the ambiguity; we wish everlasting happiness while seeking incomparable magic moments… In reality, from all these contradictions, we are looking for only one thing: ASTONISHMENT. We would life to astonish us every day! That’s why we all, human beings, love playing, because games are synonymous of risk and astonishment. Games are enactments, and the act of playing is an illusion of the illusion of the reality."

"Your eyes see what your brain expects to see..."

"Open your eyes wide and immerse yourself in your dreams without any hesitation!"

"Mapmakers of Europe and navigators of the Indies once thought Australian seas washed the isles of gold. Even after navigators had seen the north-west coast of Australia it was named on one map the coast of gold. Unknown coasts were treasurelands; imagination shaped and gilded them. Then slowly Dutch and British voyagers tarnished the gilt, and Australia turned from a land of reward to a land of punishment when Great Britain dumped convicts and guards at Sydney in 1788. The imagination of the ancients had more truth than the knowledge of the moderns, but for two generations the settlers did not know that their prison had bars of gold."

"The compound of bigness and communism made Soviet Russia very much an ogre in the 1920s and accentuated her isolation from the rest of the world. In turn the Soviet's acute sense of isolation, the sense of living in a perilous world and, above all, the bitter memory of foreign intervention between 1918 and 1920, made her, in self-defence, more authoritarian in her internal policies, and spurred the campaign to regiment and unify her people and fortify her economy, thus conferring on the word 'communism' an additional wrapping of terror. This sense of isolation must have also intensified the Soviet Union's desire to extend her territory and her sphere of influence in eastern Europe, and she seized the opportunity which came at the end of the Second World War."

"With the help of hindsight it is easy to imagine the stone-age migrants moving along the shortest possible route to Australia, but there is no reason why they should have taken the shortest route. Australia was merely the chance terminus of a series of voyages and migrations spread in all probability over many generations."

"The convict era gave Australia a high English and Irish population and a predominance of men, a tendency to disdain authority and resent policemen, and probably a love of leisure and an indifference to religion. The convict era imposed on governments from the outset a high and detailed role in economic and social life. Some of these convict influences were fragile and were quickly erased or reversed by the waves of free immigration; some were reinforced by later events, so that they persist to this day."

"The continent had to be discovered emotionally. It had to become a homeland and feel like home. The sense of overpowering space, the isolation, the warmth of summer, the garish light, the shiny-leafed trees, the birds and insects, the smell of air filled with dust, the strange silences, and the landscapes in all their oddness had to become familiar."

"I do not accept the view, widely held in the Federal Cabinet, that some kind of slow Asian takeover of Australia is inevitable. I do not believe that we are powerless. I do believe that we can with good will and good sense control our destiny.... As a people, we seem to move from extreme to extreme. In the past 30 years the government of Australia has moved from the extreme of wanting a white Australia to the extreme of saying that we will have an Asian Australia and that the quicker we move towards it the better."

"The argument by white and black Australians that the events of 1788 are primarily to blame for the plight of many Aborigines is far too negative. The solutions which have been proposed - massive land rights, white confessions of guilt and the granting of hereditary privileges to Aborigines - essentially look backwards. Moreover, the solutions are based on a version of history which is much less valid than its exponents believe."

"In a democracy, all voters are equal but not all are responsible. Compulsory voting ignores that elemental truth."

"Whether we like the idea or not, war has again and again been seen as the great auditor, the special testing time, of a nation's strength and fibre."

"When traditional Australians argue that Asian migrants should be welcome but that the ethnic mix of the nation should not be altered too quickly, they are labelled racists. But when ethnic minorities lobby politicians to enlist as many new migrants as possible from their own race, this is applauded as multiculturalism."

"Some historians looking back on our era will probably marvel at the fragile economic arguments used to justify the present migration policy. Even more they will wonder at the self-deception of those who defend the policy largely in the name of ethics and morality."

"The multicultural lobby has little respect for the history of Australia between 1788 and 1950. In the eyes of multicultural supporters, Australia was a desert between 1788 and 1950 because it was populated largely by people from the British Isles and because it seemed to have a cultural unity, a homogeneity which is the very antithesis of multiculturalism."

"In economics, as in politics, no national reservoir can stand the strain when everyone is turning on the taps and few are bothering to see that the catchments to the reservoir are working."

"Multiculturalism is really a policy designed for those who hold two passports and who can abandon Australia if our society collapses – indeed if it collapses through the foolish policies they themselves have imposed. For the millions of Australians who have no other nation to fall back upon, multiculturalism is almost an insult. It is divisive. It threatens social cohesion. It could, in the long-term, also endanger Australia's military security because it sets up enclaves which in a crisis could appeal to their own homelands for help."

"To some extent my generation was reared on the Three Cheers view of history. This patriotic view of our past had a long run. It saw Australian history as largely a success. While the convict era was a source of shame or unease, nearly everything that came after was believed to be pretty good... There is a rival view, which I call the Black Armband view of history. In recent years it has assailed the optimistic view of Australian history. The black armbands were quietly worn in official circles in 1988, the bicentennial year. Until late in that year Mr Hawke rarely gave a speech that awarded much praise to Australia's history. Even notable Labor leaders from the past - Fisher, Hughes, Scullin, Curtin and Chifley - if listening in their graves in 1988, would have heard virtually no mention of their name and their contributions to the nation they faithfully served. Indeed the Hawke Government excised the earlier official slogan, "The Australian Achievement", replacing it with "Living Together" - a slogan that belongs less to national affairs than to personal affairs. The multicultural folk busily preached their message that until they arrived much of Australian history was a disgrace. The past treatment of Aborigines, of Chinese, of Kanakas, of non-British migrants, of women, the very old, the very young, and the poor was singled out, sometimes legitimately, sometimes not... To some extent the Black Armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced."

"In Australia democracy is less in favour in intellectual circles today than 30 years ago. The more emphasis that is placed on the rights of minorities, and the need for affirmative action to enhance those rights, the more is the concept of democracy - and the rights of the majority - in danger of being weakened."

"Anyone who tries to range over the last 200 years of Australia's history, surveying the successes and failures, and trying to understand the obstacles that stood in the way, cannot easily accept the gloomier summaries of that history."

"Those who one-sidedly depict the early European history of Australia are endangering one of the gains of recent years: the willingness to examine the long years of traditional Aboriginal history with sympathy and understanding. Just as the history of European Australia can be denounced from a one-sided point of view, so too can the history of black Australia be depicted by the one-eyed as a story of savagery. To revert to such denunciations would be a loss to all Australians, black and white."

"Full-blooded democracy still remains a brave new experiment, the history of ancient Athens notwithstanding. It would be unwise to assume that its victory across the globe is inevitable, for democracy is not always a simple mode of governing. It is almost forgotten that one reason why in this century the world stood three times on the verge of chaos - during two world wars and one world depression - was that the leading democracies were almost as prone to accidents and blunders as were their authoritarian rivals."

"During their long period of unease about a hot Christmas, Australians rarely noticed that they had more access than their British relatives to a vital part of the traditional Christmas story: 'the stars in the bright sky'. Eventually they ceased to lament that their Christmas came in hot weather."

"The birth of the 20th century was like a flaming sunrise. More was expected of the century than any other. So much had been achieved in the previous one that it seemed sensible to expect that henceforth the world's triumphs would far outweigh the disasters."

"The present viewpoint is that Stalin proved to be the most resolute leader, that the Soviet Union exerted undue influence in reshaping the map of postwar Europe, and that a war purportedly begun to defend the independence of small European nations ended up by sacrificing them. The question — did Stalin outwit and outjostle Roosevelt and Churchill — will remain one of the enigmas of the 20th century."

"The rush of events in the Soviet Union, Germany, eastern Europe and China in the late 1980s and the very early 1990s had no parallel in modern history. During the last thousand years no other formidable empire in a time of comparative peace had been dissolved so quickly, so unexpectedly, as the Soviet Union."

"Science and technology have a simple and persuasive message: the world's problems are soluble by ingenuity and material innovations; the world's riddles, such as the origins of the universe, can be unravelled by the scientific mind. But while science's achievements have been remarkable, they have not been revolutionary in probing human nature. In some ways the measurable problems analysed by science and technology are more easily dissected than human problems. The moon is more easily explored than the typical mind and heart."

"Christianity has both spurred and retarded the sciences and social sciences. Indeed, most of the modern debates of profound significance were originally dialogues with or within Christianity."

"Christianity probably has been the most important institution in the world in the last 2000 years. It has achieved more for western civilisation than has any other factor; it has helped far more people than it has harmed."

"Could the Aboriginal and the British cultures have been reconciled when they first met? The prevailing view is that they could have signed a treaty and found a way of ­living together in relative ­harmony. I am not persuaded. The two confronting cultures, whether first living side by side at Sydney in 1788 or at Perth in 1829, had little in common except that they were the product of human beings. Their languages and religions differed. Their attitude to marriage, family, property and individual wealth, their economic and political systems, their way of fighting, and their thoughts about life and death, were far apart. In the world today no two cultures are so far apart as those that lived side by side in many Australian regions after 1788. Mecca and Washington today have far more in common than did the paternal ­Governor Phillip and the Aborigines whom he met in Sydney in 1788."

"Some talk of the “history wars” raging in Australia. The word “war” is mistaken. Controversy, not war, will continue for a long time to come. It is in the nature of history and of most intellectual activities, and the more so in a nation where the main strands of history – ­Aboriginal and European – are utterly different."

"Australia became a full-blooded democracy in the late 1850s, achieving it with lightning speed. Only 30 years previously it had consisted of two convict colonies, ruled by governors whose personal power was magnified because most of their subjects were prisoners or ex-prisoners. Moreover, the governors were so remote geographically that Britain’s control of them and their decisions was loose. One year might elapse between the governor writing an urgent dispatch to London, and the arrival of an official reply. And yet, from this prison-like regime, democracy speedily emerged. This was an exceptional outcome."

"At one time — less so, today — I was often called “controversial” in the media. It’s odd that the word has a negative flavour. Why good journalists and academics should use the word as a weapon is puzzling. They actually dine on controversy: why do they scorn their own food?"

"Sections of the media, universities and schools exaggerate the bad news [about Australia's past]. This is a powerful ingredient in the present criticism of Australia Day. These critics, putting on their black armbands, now imagine that before 1788 the Aborigines lived in a kind of paradise, from which later they were brutally and deliberately expelled. Aboriginal life did have many virtues, and from the 1950s Australian archeologists, anthropologists, prehistorians and others rediscovered them. The nation owes them a debt. But the extreme concept of a paradise, wholesome and more spiritual than Australia today, has also won converts. They depict Aborigines as living in peace and harmony with one another and with nature. But the evidence, globally, is that these traditional societies suffered through warfare and that little children and women were often the victims. Massacres of Aborigines by Aborigines, however, are unlikely to find their way into the main textbooks. Their extinction of native fauna will rarely interrupt a school lesson."

"I continued to admire him as a distinguished exponent of the craft of history writing. By the mid-1980s, I guess our views on certain current-day topics were moving far apart; while we rode comfortably in the same train we got off at different stations."

"Calwell impressed me partly because of his deep affection for his country and his willingness to see the good in other countries, especially the United States, from which his grandfather had emigrated to the Victorian goldfields. The Aboriginal peoples, as Australians, also came within his affection, and he as much as any public figure of that time tried to help them. Forty years on I came to think just as highly of B.A. Santamaria, the leading Catholic intellectual, as I did of Arthur Calwell, though they were bitter enemies. When you admire people you sometimes do so for the person they are, more than the viewpoint they represent."

"Cook was a giant of the sea. To deprive him, his scientists and his crew of high praise would be mean-spirited and would mock history. He was almost certainly the first European to sail along and report on nearly all the eastern coast of Australia. He indirectly made possible present-day Australia which, despite its many failures, is surely one of the success stories of the world. On the other hand, Aboriginal peoples will rightly insist that they, or people close to them in kinship, were the first discoverers of Australia. Their ancestors, one after the other, had sailed and walked along the Indonesian archipelago, a chain of stepping stones that were easily used when the world’s sea levels were lower."

"The essence of studying history is that, as best we can, we try to wear the shoes and put on the spectacles worn by people of the past. We try to see the obstacles and dilemmas they struggled against or evaded. We also hope that the future will try to understand why we made blunders, and learn from failures and achievements of our era."

"The Latin language is no longer read widely, and so we have lost sight of the old distinction between the real Terra Australis or Australia on the one hand, and the unknown continent called Terra Australis Incognita on the other. That distinction, however, was real to scientists and geographers living in the eighteenth century. They knew of one southern continent, now known as Australia, but then called New Holland by the Dutch and even by the English. But somewhere, out in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, lay another and richer continent, which, they believed, was waiting to be found."

"One of the most remarkable voyagers in the long history of the seas, he [James Cook] deserves far more praise than blame. Contrary to the common belief, he admired the Aborigines and facets of their traditional way of life. Above all he grasped this continent and began unknowingly the work of knitting it again to the outside world. On the whole the outside world has gained because of his epic voyage. The settlers who arrived after him eventually made this land so productive that it is capable, almost annually, of feeding tens of millions of people in foreign lands as well as all those in Australia. Here flourishes a democratic society which offers freedom in a world where freedom is not — and never was — the right of most people."

"... jostling and jockeying [between England and France] was a vital background to the decision of the English government to send a fleet to occupy Botany Bay. In some ways the decision was made for the far future. For the short term it was simply vital that France should not be allowed to occupy such a strategic site."

"Ironically Britain claimed the whole continent simply in order to claim a few isolated harbours astride trade routes. It was like a speculator who, buying a huge wasteland flanking a highway because it had a few fine sites for road cafes and filling stations, found later that much of the land was fertile and productive."

"Australia's distance from Europe was probably only tolerable because it had strategic commodities which England, threatened by changing European alliances, might some day be unable to produce in the northern hemisphere. Flax was the first conqueror - a hollow conqueror - of the distance which so often shaped Australia's destiny."

"A sure supply of flax, wrote Lord Sydney, 'would be of great consequence to us as a naval power'. At the same time the tall trees which grew to the water's edge in New Zealand and in islands near Australia would yield masts of unparalleled size and quality for the British fleets in India. Australia would thus be 'reciprocally beneficial' both to English gaols and to English seapower. Thus Lord Sydney affirmed the traditional principle that England expected more gains than the simple pleasure of ridding her soil of criminals. Australia then was not designed simply as a remote gaol, cut off from the world's commerce. It was to supply strategic materials."

"Australia's place on new trade routes was decisive in its early history. It aided the convict settlement. It prompted the rise of a new free group of Australian traders who did not depend heavily on the favours of governors, who were alert for new ways of making money, and who were eventually to hasten Australia's transition from a gaol to a series of free colonies."

"The convict system in essence was a form of compulsory, assisted migration. It eased the problems created by Australia's distance from Britain. Without it relatively few people from the British Isles would have made the costly journey across the world in Australia's first half century."

"The value of subsidised migration was not simply in the working men it brought to Australia. Its value was also in the women it enticed to a man's land. One of Australia's sharpest social problems, and one of the problems which Edward Gibbon Wakefield lamented, was the scarcity of women of marriageable or elopable age. So long as Australia primarily served as a gaol for the British Isles, far more men than women came to the land."

"Australia and New Zealand depended so much on Britain, were in most senses imitations of Britain, that their geographical position near the end of Asia's tail and near the islands of Oceania seemed irrelevant."

"In December 1941, when Australians began to sense that they were plunged into a new environment, the spectacles they had carried out from Britain were obsolete. They needed spectacles that would correct short-sightedness. They had to see the environment they were in as clearly as the environment they had left across the world."

"Much of Australia's history had been shaped by the contradiction that it depended intimately and comprehensively on a country which was further away that almost any other in the world. Now the dependence had slackened, the distance had diminished. The Antipodes were drifting, though where they were drifting no one knew."

"No wars are unintended or 'accidental'. What is often unintended is the length and bloodiness of the war."

"War and peace are not separate compartments. Peace depends on threats and force; often peace is the crystallisation of past force."

"It is the problem of accurately measuring the relative power of nations which goes far to explain why wars occur. War is a dispute about the measurement of power. War marks the choice of a new set of weights and measures."

"Wars end when nations agree that war is an unsatisfactory instrument for solving their dispute; wars begin when nations agree that peaceful diplomacy is an unsatisfactory instrument for solving their dispute. Agreement is the essence of the transition from peace to war and from war to peace, for those are merely alternating phases of a relationship between nations."

"Since every nation tends to believe that each of its past wars was fought in self-defence, a drawn war is more likely to be remembered as a victory."

"Why did nations turn so often to war in the belief that it was a sharp and quick instrument for shaping international affairs when again and again the instrument had proved to be blunt or unpredictable? This recurring optimism is a vital prelude to war. Anything which increases the optimism is a cause of war. Anything which dampens that optimism is a cause of peace."

"One may suggest that nations, in assessing their relative strength, were influenced by seven main factors: military strength and the ability to apply that strength efficiently in the chosen zone of war; predictions on how outside nations would behave in the event of war; perceptions of internal unity and the unity or discord of the enemy; memory or forgetfulness of the realities and sufferings of war; perceptions of prosperity and of ability to sustain, economically, the kind of war envisaged; nationalism and ideology: and the personality and mental qualities of the leaders who weighted the evidence and decided for peace or war."

"Every nation has the right to control its own immigration. To shape sensibly an immigration policy is to influence nearly every facet of life, now and for generations to come."

"A policy on immigration helps to determine the unity as well as the size of the population. Should Australia so select its immigrants that the society is relatively unified? Or should it select immigrants who promote diversity? Should Australia continue to be dominated by Anglo-Celtic peoples and the English language and institutions? Or should it become the new Eurasia? In choosing immigrants and the pace at which they arrive, how far should we risk social and racial tensions?"

"Democracy is not like a long-term loan of property to be entrusted by the people to the government and its small group of advisors. And yet in recent years a small group of people has successfully snatched immigration policy from the public arena, and has even placed a taboo on the discussion of vital aspects of immigration."

"Our immigration policy is increasingly based on an appeal to international precepts that our neighbours sensibly refuse to practise. We are surrendering much of our own independence to a phantom opinion that floats vaguely in the air and rarely exists on this earth. We should think very carefully about the perils of converting Australia into a giant multicultural laboratory for the assumed benefit of the peoples of the world."

"An immigration policy in any country is based more or less on discrimination. A minister of immigration is a minister of discrimination. If he isn't, he is not carrying out his responsibilities."

"On the immigration issue the suspicions towards democracy and the distrust towards free speech have come largely from the Left. The distrust of free speech has been especially noticeable amongst a small scatter of academics, members of a profession that by its very nature depends on freedom of inquiry and speech."

"The majority of Australians are now paying the price of a policy that is eager to please each ethnic minority at the expense of the great majority. If the people of each minority should have the right to establish here a way of life familiar to them, is it not equally right - or more so, in democracy - for the majority of Australians to retain the way of life familiar to them?"

"Whereas the old White Australia Policy, in its extreme form, kept out all Asians, the new policy could be moving towards the opposite extreme. In calling for a strong, long-term flow of Third World migrants, it foreshadows the sacrificing of vital Australian interests on behalf of vague international creeds. It is also forsaking out historical experience for the sake of a nimble dream."

"Again and again Australia is depicted as a bonanza - ready made - that was snatched from the Aboriginals. But the Australia of the Aboriginals, distinctive as were its achievements, was not a bonanza. Generations of Australians since 1788 have developed this land and its resources, applying sweat and grit and ingenuity. Asian immigrants had the opportunity to come, several hundred years ago, but they had no incentive to come. Australia then was not worth colonizing."

"Immigration is everyone's business: it is one of the most important national issues. The idea that it is too dangerous to be debated is a mockery of democracy. It is too important not to debate."

"The ethnic composition of the population - and the particular mixture of nationalities, languages and cultures - is a matter of importance to all nations. The selection of immigrants should not be seen primarily as a test of which nationalities are best. It is more important to select immigrants with an eye to the collective effect on the nation. An immigration policy is not a symbol, a banner, of a nation's attitude to other peoples or races; and to reject potential immigrants is in no way to doubt the worthiness of their nationality or culture."

"The multicultural policy has, at times, tended to emphasize the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of Australians, thus unnecessarily encouraging divisions and weakening social cohesion. It has tended to be anti-British, and yet the people from the United Kingdom and Ireland form the dominant class of pre-war immigrants and the largest single group of post-war immigrants."

"Recent governments emphasize the merits of a multicultural society and ignore the dangers. And yet the evidence is clear that many multicultural societies have failed and that the human cost of the failure has been high."

"There are dangers in the increasing belief that toleration can simply be imposed on people by a variety of new laws and by a bureaucracy specializing in ethnic affairs, cultural relations and human rights. Unfortunately, the laws and regulatory bodies, introduced in the hope of promoting toleration, can be invoked to attack freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and those principles on which minority rights must, in the last resort, depend. A sensible humane immigration policy is more likely than most of these new agencies and laws - present or proposed - to maintain and foster racial toleration."

"People need to feel they belong to their country. Their need for community is most pronounced in a time of adversity. The people who are hit hardest by a depression, who feel that their children will suffer, look for loyalty from the rest of the community and the government. The present immigration programme, in its indifference to the feelings of the old Australians, erodes those loyalties. The multicultural policy, and its emphasis on what is different and on the rights of the new minority rather than the old majority, gnaws at that sense of solidarity that many people crave for."

"A nation is drawn together by loyalties and obligations, and in a depression or war those bonds are vital. Sir Henry Parkes, a father of the Commonwealth of Australia, said in 1890: 'The crimson thread of kinship runs through us all.' That crimson thread is vital for any nation, but in the last six years there has been a growing concern at the way in which Australian governments, perhaps with lofty aims, have cut the crimson threads. The cult of the immigrant, the emphasis on separateness for ethnic groups, the wooing of Asia and the shunning of Britain are part of this thread-cutting."

"Australia will have to find ways of impressing on Asia and the rest of the world that much of its territory is arid. To sell Australia successfully is not only to sell its products and its tourism, but also sell to other nations the fact that much of its territory is desert and can support few people."

"The First World War shook the scaffolding of progress because it was deadly and unexpectedly long: it showed that technology could be two-faced. The war delivered one other insidious attack on the idea of progress by raising a moral question which the believers in progress had taken for granted: had the morality of Europeans improved during the long era of 'progress'?"

"One lesson of history is that every gain has its potential loss. The highest human achievements carry the danger of pride, and pride can lead blindly to disaster, just as failure can fortify the determination and so lead slowly towards triumph."

"The slow decline of Christianity prepared the way for new Utopias and doomsdays. Indeed some of the new views of the future contained many of the characteristics of a religion."

"If we disown history we are at its mercy. To have a reasonable knowledge of the past is to possess an anchor which is likely to prevent us from being swept towards false ideas about the present and future."

"Democracy is a freak condition in the world's history: civil liberties are not common liberties even today, and most people in the world have never possessed them."

"The eclipse of the Aborigines was tragic. Could it have been averted? It could have been prevented for a time if no British settlers had landed, but eventually people of other European or Asian nations would have come and occupied much of the land."

"The shrinking world was becoming too small to permit a whole people to be set aside in a vast protected anthropological museum where they would try to perpetuate the merits and defects of a way of life that had vanished elsewhere, a way of life that - so long as it continued - would deprive millions of foreign people of the food and fibres that could have been grown on the land."

"Even in the 1860s and 1870s most Australians did not feel fully at home in their land. So many of them were new migrants, mostly from the British cities, and so they found rural Australia strange and even hostile at first. Above all, in the long European see-saw of ideas and taste, the wilderness and untamed nature were falling somewhat from favour; to be revived late in the century. Attitudes to Australian landscape reflected this see-saw."

"There is a delicate balance between shielding people and encouraging them, and the USA perhaps went too far in one direction and Australia in the other. The Soviet Union, born in 1917 and influenced a little by the exciting Australian and New Zealand experiments, would eventually show how the umbrella, if too big and cumbersome, exposed people far more than it protected them."

"The history of Australia, black or white, is not only the struggle between peoples but the struggle between nature and people. Nature tamed many of the settlers, sometimes defeating them, but people held many victories, sometimes at high cost."

"The decline of the churches was a sweeping social revolution, because they had done more than any other institution, public or private, to civilise Australians."

"Australia is increasingly the story of a few large cities, but a thousand half-forgotten townships still view themselves as the emotional heart of the nation."

"The magnitude of these shattering changes can perhaps be grasped by imagining that the invasion had been in the reverse direction and that the Aztecs or Incas had arrived suddenly in Europe, imposed their culture and calendar, outlawed Christianity, set up sacrificial altars for thousands of victims in Madrid and Amsterdam, unwittingly spread disease on a scale that virtually matched the Black Death, melted down the golden images of Christ and the saints, threw stones at the stained-glass windows and converted the cathedral aisles into arms or food warehouses, toppled unfamiliar Greek statues and Roman columns, and carried home to the Mexican and Peruvian highlands their loot in precious metals along with slaves, indentured servants and other human trophies."

"It is remarkable that India became a democracy in modern times, because the long-lasting Hindu civilisation at first sight was innately hostile to the ideas that all adults should have an equal vote, irrespective of their caste, and that all adults should be able to share in the social mobility which was part of the democratic spirit. But to graft exotic new trees onto old, when there seemed little hope of success, and to watch them grow vigorously, is not a rare experience in human institutions."

"Looking back on Rome's success, it is all too easy to conclude that its victories were preordained. It is almost as if Rome arose with consummate certainty from the seven hills, gaining such a height that seemingly it could not be challenged. But in almost every phase of Rome's history there were crises."

"Unpredictable events, or the coincidence of vital events happening side by side, play their part in history. In the emerging of the United States of America, the South American nations, South Africa, Canada and Australia the unforeseen mixture of events was especially powerful in the final decades of the 18th century. Many of those events pirouetted around the fortunes of France, whose influence was as decisive when it was losing as when it was winning wars."

"The power of the United States depended heavily on its pale empire of ideas, attitudes and innovations. Its ideas alighted effortlessly on foreign ground, irrespective of who owned the ground. Much of its influence came from such innovations as the telephone, electricity, aircraft and the cheap car, nuclear weapons and spacecraft, computers and the Internet. Its influence came through jazz, cartoons, Hollywood, television and popular culture. Its influence came from an excitement about technology and economic change, and a belief in incentives and individual enterprise. It was also the most ardent missionary for the creed of democracy. While military and economic might was vital to the success of the United States, the power of its pale empire of ideas was probably even more pervasive."

"The global role of the United States is perhaps the ultimate chapter in that long period of European expansion which had begun in western Europe, and especially on the Atlantic seaboard, during the 15th century. Europe slowly had outgrown its homeland. Its cultural empire eventually formed a long band traversing most of the Northern Hemisphere and dipping far into the Southern. The modern hub of the peoples and ideas of European origin is now New York as much as Paris, or Los Angeles as much as London. In the history of the European peoples the city of Washington is perhaps what Constantinople - the infant city of Emperor Constantine - was to the last phase of the Roman Empire; for it is unlikely that Europeans, a century hence, will continue to stamp the world so decisively with their ideas and inventions."

"Within the next two centuries, as the world shrinks and its distances are diminished, an attempt could well be made, by consent or by force, to set up a world government. Whether it will last for long is an open question. In human history, almost nothing is preordained."

"We have long believed that during the time of the Aborigines' domination their landscape did not change. At times it changed dramatically. The basalt plains of that part of Victoria, which was later named Australia Felix, were violently affected by volcanoes. For most of the people living close to the ocean - and for some who had never seen it - a more shattering change was the rising of the sea and the drowning of their hunting grounds. Nothing in the short history of British Australia can match those physical changes."

"Nothing in the traditional life of Aborigines was more impressive than their practical knowledge. They were masters of their environment even though they could do little to change it."

"For ages the Aborigines had relied heavily on isolation. It was their asset and their liability, and gave them long-term control of the continent. But if their isolation were to end, as it ultimately had to end with a shrinking world, their whole way of life could be fractured. Even the arrival of a few thousand permanent settlers, whether from Europe or Asia, would be like the first tremors of an earthquake."

"Whereas for thousands of years there was some prospect that the economic and social life of the Aborigines would be reshaped by the entry of immigrants from the Indonesian archipelago or New Guinea, the real reshaping was to be drastic. Whereas gardening could be grafted onto a semi-nomadic life, the economic activities and energies of England of 1800 would shatter the social and economic customs of the Aborigines."

"Many convicts were bewildered by the first days of the voyage to Australia. Most had never seen the open sea until they boarded the convict ship, and few had travelled in a ship. And now, by sentence of the courts, they were about to begin one of the longest voyages any traveller could make."

"When in Hobart in May 1853 the ship St Vincent sent ashore the last consignment of convicts, Tasmania had received almost as many convicts as New South Wales during the long history of transportation. Western Australia now remained the only penal colony and it received its last convict ship on 9 January 1868. For eighty years convicts had been shipped to Australia, and a total of 163000 had set out on that voyage from which few returned. In the modern history of Europe there was rarely a planned deportation on a more ambitious scale until the era of Stalin and Hitler."

"France's decision to ignore Australia was understandable. Even colonial Australians took little interest in most parts of their own land, and hardly a soul in Melbourne or Sydney thought kindly of the idea of setting up any kind of business... on the shores of the Indian Ocean or Arafura Sea. The effects of this decision, or default, were far-reaching. The huge continent became the sole possession of Britain. Few decisions have had more influence on Australia's modern history."

"Most Australians did not love a sunburnt country. Farmers preferred a reliable rainfall; bank managers and city merchants preferred to deal with customers living in towns where the economy did not suffer from drought. The governors, who came from the British Isles, still retreated in summer to the cool hill towns - to Sutton Forest and Mount Macedon and the Mount Lofty Ranges and other colonial Simlas."

"The birth of a nation called for many fathers, none of whom could be pre-eminent, and when Parkes died the federation was only a balloon floating beckoningly in the air."

"If, on the eve of the war, a fortune teller had pointed to all the Australian men between the ages of 20 and 30, and had predicted that a number equal to 60 per cent of that age group would be killed or permanently disabled in the coming war, she would have been ridiculed but she would have been correct."

"The idea is still widespread that Australians were among the world's most persistent racists until the White Australia policy was abolished. But in 1900, and long after, almost every part of the Western world was wary of large-scale immigration from poorer, low-wage countries whose reigning culture was different. Asians at times were wary of outsiders. Between 1860 and 1914 it was safer to be a Chinese gold-digger living in Australia than to be an Australian, especially a female missionary, living in China."

"Perhaps no Australian politician, to this day, has made such a mark for so long on the global stage as Hughes achieved in the first half of 1919."

"Innovation is usually not a gigantic step but a series of small jumps involving various enterprising people whose names are soon forgotten."

"Menzies was the first - and maybe the only - national leader of whom it could be safely said that he was capable of rising to the top of almost any ladder he dared to climb."

"One Australian tradition is to cut down the elite and the successful. It had its roots in the era of convicts who naturally opposed those in authority. This levelling or egalitarian tradition continued to flourish on the goldfields in the 1850s when the unusual mining laws gave everyone an opportunity to find gold, and the tradition was accentuated around 1900 by the rising trade unions. The attitude was one of the spurs to Australian democracy."

"A few important Muslim leaders regretted that Australian society, as they experienced it, defied their beliefs and preachings. In their eyes it was decadent and irreligious. And yet one century earlier, a host of Australian churchgoers would have agreed with the mainstream Muslim suspicion of alcohol, drugs, pornography, party-going, scantily clad women, blasphemous language, suicide, homosexuality and the Sabbath. It was the Christians who, in the following four generations, relaxed their views on these social questions. They became more tolerant at a time when sections of Islam were becoming less tolerant."

"A ‘fifth-generation dynast’ Rahul Gandhi has no chance in Indian politics against ‘hard-working and self-made’ Narendra Modi, and Kerala did disastrous thing by electing Congress leader to Parliament...Narendra Modi’s great advantage is that he is not Rahul Gandhi. He is self-made. He has run a state for 15 years, he has administrative experience, he is incredibly hard-working and he never takes holidays in Europe...“India is becoming more democratic and less feudal, and the Gandhis just don’t realise this. You (Sonia) are in Delhi, your kingdom is shrinking more and more, but still, your chamchas (sycophants) are telling you that you are still the Badshah.”... the fact that they loved other nations more than India. The rise of aggressive nationalism worldwide and “the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in neighbouring countries are some other reasons behind the evident leap of Hindutva in India in recent times..."

"[On “truly frightening” right-wing Hindu nationalism (by an Indian questioner), whether it will always be a force:] As a citizen, I detest right-wing Hindu nationalism, I will vote for any other party. As a historian, I would say; so long as you have Pakistan, you will have Hindu nationalism. If the political class is alert, it will weaken, but if the political class is weak, Hindu nationalism will be in the ascendant. The Jihadis bomb Bombay to provoke Hindu-Muslim violence. The Kashmiri movement started for rights, was taken over by Jihadis, and expelled Hindus from the Valley."

"Tagore’s poems and stories are mostly set in Bengal. However, in his non-fiction, that is to say in his letters, essays, talks, and polemics, he wrote extensively on the relations between the different cultures and countries of the world. Tagore, notes Humayun Kabir, ‘was the first great Indian in recent times who went out on a cultural mission for restoring contacts and establishing friendships with peoples of other countries without any immediate or specific educational, economic, political or religious aim. It is also remarkable that his cultural journeys were not confined to the western world’. He visited Europe and North America, but also Japan, China, Iran, Latin America, and Indo-China. That these travels were undertaken without any instrumental purpose marks Tagore out from the other members of our great quartet. Gandhi studied law in London and later went to South Africa to work. After he finally returned to India, in 1915, he visited England, once, to negotiate with the British Government. Apart from a short trip to Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon), he did not otherwise travel abroad in the last three decades of his life. As a young man, Ambedkar went to the United States and the United Kingdom to acquire advanced degrees in law and economics. Then he came back to a life of social activism in India. In later years, his trips overseas were to participate in political or academic conferences. At first glance, Nehru seems to have matched Tagore as a world traveller. Nehru first went overseas as a boy, to study at an English public school. Later, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, he travelled through Europe to forge links between the Indian freedom struggle and the world socialist movement. Still later, as Prime Minister of India between 1947 and 1964, he visited many different countries and continents. He went in his official capacity, representing and negotiating for his nation. Before and after Independence, Nehru’s journeys abroad were thus wholly political. (The one exception was when his wife fell seriously ill, and had to be taken to Europe for treatment.) On the other hand, Tagore travelled to other lands out of curiosity, simply to see and speak with humans of a cultural background other than his own."

"Most Indians – and, following Attenborough's film, many non-Indians too – are moderately well acquainted with the colleagues and critics of the mature Gandhi. Yet they know very little about those who worked with him in South Africa. Here, his closest friends outside his family were two Hindus (a doctor turned jeweller and a liberal politician respectively); two Jews (one a journalist from England, the other an architect originally from Eastern Europe); and two Christian clergymen (one a Baptist, the other an Anglican). These six men were, so to speak, the South African analogues of Gandhi's famous colleagues in the Indian freedom struggle – Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose, Madeleine Slade (Mira Behn), C. Rajagopalachari, Maulana Azad, et al. They are much less recognized (in some cases, unrecognized), although their impact on Gandhi's character and conduct may have been even more decisive, for they came into his life when he was not yet a great public figure or 'Mahatma' – as he was in India – but a struggling, searching activist."

"Where do Goldman and Eaton and Trautmann and Zelliot and Gold figure in the canon of South Asian Studies? Judging from the country where they work in, the United States of America, not very high. Were they to enter a seminar room at the Association of Asian Studies meetings there would not be the buzz that would certainly accompany the entrance of diasporic scholars ten times as glamorous but not half as accomplished."

"Three men did most to make Hinduism a modern faith. Of these the first was not recognized as a Hindu by the Shankaracharyas; the second was not recognized as a Hindu by himself; the third was born a Hindu but made certain he would not die as one. These three great reformers were Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar. Gandhi and Nehru, working together, helped Hindus make their peace with modern ideas of democracy and secularism. Gandhi and Ambedkar, working by contrasting methods and in opposition to one another, made Hindus recognize the evils and horrors of the system of Untouchability. Nehru and Ambedkar, working sometimes together, sometimes separately, forced Hindus to grant, in law if not always in practice, equal rights to their women. The Gandhi-Nehru relationship has been the subject of countless books down the years. Books on the Congress, which document how these two made the party the principal vehicle of Indian nationalism; books on Gandhi, which have to deal necessarily with the man he chose to succeed him; books on Nehru, which pay proper respect to the man who influenced him more than anyone else. Books too numerous to mention, among which I might be allowed to single out, as being worthy of special mention, Sarvepalli Gopal’s Jawaharlal Nehru, B. R. Nanda’s Mahatma Gandhi, and Rajmohan Gandhi’s The Good Boatman. In recent years, the Gandhi-Ambedkar relationship has also attracted a fair share of attention. Some of this has been polemical and even petty; as in Arun Shourie’s Worshipping False Gods (which is deeply unfair to Ambedkar), and Jabbar Patel’s film Ambedkar (which is inexplicably hostile to Gandhi). But there have also been some sensitive studies of the troubled relationship between the upper caste Hindu who abhorred Untouchability and the greatest of Dalit reformers. These include, on the political side, the essays of Eleanor Zelliott and Denis Dalton; and on the moral and psychological side, D. R. Nagaraj’s brilliant little book The Flaming Feet. By contrast, the Nehru-Ambedkar relationship has been consigned to obscurity. There is no book about it, nor, to my knowledge, even a decent scholarly article. That is a pity, because for several crucial years they worked together in the Government of India, as Prime Minister and Law Minister respectively."

"I was a student at the Delhi School at the very end of its Golden Age. The departments of economics and sociology were still world-class. Amartya Sen had left for England and M. N. Srinivas had retired to Bangalore; but Sukhamoy Chakravarty and André Béteille remained. There were also other brilliant scholars on the faculty—such as A. L. Nagar and Kaushik Basu in economics, and Veena Das and J. P. S. Uberoi in sociology. Both departments had active research programmes."

"Hind Swaraj is probably not the right place to start an exploration of Gandhi’s ideas. In the Cambridge edition, Anthony Parel warns the reader against the ‘vast sea of Gandhian anthologies’, but it is to these anthologies that those who wish to properly appreciate Gandhi must necessarily turn. The more thoughtful, the more informed, and the more essential Gandhi are to be found in his articles, editorials, and letters of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, written as he came to more fully understand the people and practices of the country he was to lead to self-rule. The three selections from Gandhi’s writings that I would myself recommend are those made by Nirmal Kumar Bose, Raghavan Iyer (in its three-volume rather than single-volume rendition), and Gopalkrishna Gandhi. Having read these compilations, one can then turn to Hind Swaraj, perhaps to admire its precocious defence of non-violence and religious pluralism, while puzzling over its silence on caste and its demonization of the West."

"Contrary to what is sometimes claimed in the press, there are many fine historians in India. From my own generation of scholars, I can strongly recommend — to student and lay reader alike — the work of Upinder Singh on ancient India, of Nayanjot Lahiri on the history of archaeology, of Vijaya Ramaswamy on the bhakti movement, of Sanjay Subrahmanyam on the early history of European expansion, of Chetan Singh on the decline of the Mughal State, of Sumit Guha on the social history of Western India, of Seema Alavi on the social history of medicine, of Niraja Gopal Jayal on the history of citizenship, of Tirthankar Roy on the economic consequences of colonialism, of Mahesh Rangarajan on the history of forests and wildlife, and of A. R. Venkatachalapathy on South Indian cultural history."

"In the generation (or two generations) before mine, the leading Indian historians (judged in terms of scholarly books and papers written and read) included Irfan Habib, R. S. Sharma, Ranajit Guha, Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Amalendu Guha, Sumit Sarkar, and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, all of whom were influenced to a lesser or greater degree by Marxism; and Ashin Dasgupta, Dharma Kumar, Parthasarathy Gupta, Amales Tripathi, Rajat Kanta Rai, Mushirul Hasan, and Tapan Roychowdhury, all of whom were liberals. The leading political scientists included the liberals Rajni Kothari, Basheeruddin Ahmed and Ramashray Ray; the Marxists Javed Alam and Partha Chatterjee; and Ashis Nandy, an admirer of Tagore and Gandhi who like them stoutly resists being classified in conventional terms. The pre-eminent sociologists of that generation were M. N. Srinivas and André Béteille, both of whom would own the label ‘liberal’; and T. N. Madan, who while working on classically conservative themes such as family, kinship and religion would most likely see himself as a liberal too. Even the best-known or most influential economists of the 1960s and 1970 tended to be on the left of the spectrum, as the names of K. N. Raj, Amartya Sen, V. M. Dandekar, Amit Bhaduri, Krishna Bharadwaj, Pranab Bardhan, Prabhat and Utsa Patnaik, and Ashok Rudra (among others) signify."

"Ramachandra Guha himself claims that he’s a lapsed Marxist, a claim that’s suspect because this Hindu piece faithfully follows the Marxist template. The reason Guha attributes a symmetry between Hinduism and Christianity is because of Marx’s diktat that religion is the opium of the masses. And here’s a religion that refuses to conform to Marx’s definition of religion, which was primarily Christianity. Guha is thus forced to force-fit Hinduism into that definition. And that process necessitates intellectual dishonesty."

"Nevertheless, these quarrels aside, we have to admit that Prof. Ramachadra Guha is an Indian patriot and, in a real sense, a Hindu."

"It was always something of a puzzle to observers of Australia to explain the high standing of working men and the prevalence of their values in the culture. The easy answer was to say the middle-class was numerically weak. But in a capitalist society their values should be predominant whatever their numbers. So was it that they lacked the will to rule? I have suggested here that convict origins help to explain this puzzle. The bourgeoisie, sharing the shame of the nation, looked for respectability through White Australia and military prowess, and the forms these took had a strong proletarian cast; the working man was elevated by one and was the most notable embodiment of the other."

"Much of what now passes for social science is concerned not to explain human differences but to explain them away."

"To say that the Australians were more British than the British carries more of the truth than is usually realised. Britishness was not a very strong identity in Great Britain itself. The heartland of the United Kingdom was England and the English thought of themselves as English and only on the rare occasions when they wanted to be polite to the Scots did they use the term 'British'. In Australia the pressure of the Scots and especially of the Irish forced the abandonment of 'English' as the identity of the colonies in favour of 'British'. The Irish of course could still bridle at a British identity even when it included them as equals. In time, with the passing of the first generation born in Ireland and the growth of a distinctively Australian interpretation of Britishness, they were prepared to accept it."

"The expansion of Europe was the transforming force in human history of the last 500 years, and yet the modern academy looks for reasons not to study it. In the era of decolonisation the new nations want to stress their indigenous roots and sympathetic scholars explain that European influence was not overwhelming, but that it was used and subverted by locals for local purposes. To concentrate on Europe is criticised as 'Eurocentric'. But to ignore Europe makes the history of any part of the globe unintelligible."

"The European discovery rather than Aboriginal occupation constitutes Australia's pre-history. Australia - its economy, society and polity - is a construction of European civilisation. Australia did not exist when traditional Aborigines occupied the continent. Aborigines have been participants in Australian history, but that story begins with all the others in 1788."

"Before the Europeans arrived, there were 500 to 600 tribes in the continent speaking different languages. They did not have a common name or share an identity; they regarded each other as enemies. The Aborigines as we know them today, a national group with a common identity, did not exist before European contact; they are a product of the European invasion which destroyed traditional culture, brought people of different tribes together and gave them a common experience of oppression and marginalisation. They are not an ancient people, but a very modern one. Only in the lands which Europeans did not want or settled very sparsely did traditional groups and something like traditional culture survive."

"The expansion of Europe was a phenomenon of such magnitude with such a profound and irreversible effect on humankind that it might be thought that our moralising tendency would be silenced in the face of it. But as we saw on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage in 1992, there are those who think that its disastrous consequences for indigenous people make it quite definitely a bad thing which should not have happened. Unprovoked invasion of the territory of another society is immoral by our standards and breaches current international law, but if these be the standards we apply to history there will be no end to our condemning."

"It is somewhat odd that those who are most opposed to tradition and fixed roles in European society hold up as a model Aboriginal society with its pre-programmed roles sanctioned by an unquestionable tradition."

"Multiculturalists encourage vagueness about 'contributions' to give the impression of equal participation, as in the 'new age' school sports where every player in the team must handle the ball before a goal can be scored. If one were to compose a more precise ethnic history it would read something like this: The English, Irish and Scots were the founding population; they and their children established the Australian nation."

"Since Australia is an outgrowth of England, European civilisation is also the field of study for an intelligible history of Australia. This does not mean that every history of Australia has to begin with Charlemagne. It does mean that Australian history not set within European civilisation will convey a very poor understanding of Australian society."

"The committed federalist leaders—Parkes, Deakin, Griffith, Barton, Inglis Clark and others—were pursuing a sacred ideal of nationhood. They can be thought of as both selfish and pure. Selfish, in that the chief force driving them was the new identity and greater stature they would enjoy—either as colonists or natives—from Australia’s nationhood. Pure, in that the benefit they sought did not depend on the particular form federation took. In a sense any federation would do. They knew of course that interests had to be conciliated and other ideals not outraged; they shared some of these themselves. But they were not mere managers or lobbyists; underneath all the negotiation and campaigning there was an emotional drive."

"[O]nly in Australia was the settler population then defined as non-indigenous – there are not non-indigenous Americans or non-indigenous New Zealanders. 'Non-indigenous' implies a people without roots in this place; it elides the fact that settlers have been here for eight generations, that they have formed a distinctive polity and are not indigenous to anywhere else; they regard Australia as their home. On the other side it elides the fact that most Aborigines are descendants of settlers and the original indigenous population. The formulation in fact casts modern Australia as if it were 1788: one group has just stepped off the boat and confronts the traditional owners of the country."

"Australians, like other peoples, tend to think they are highly distinctive, but the characteristics they value may be an extension or an exaggeration of what they brought from the mother country. In some respects they may be more like the peoples of other new lands settled by the British than they are willing to acknowledge. Australian soldiers and Australian nurses of World War I felt themselves to be very different from their English counterparts but the English were inclined to see all the colonials - New Zealanders, Canadians and Australians - as similar and different from themselves."

"... if rights are to be protected there must be a community to which people are warmly attached so that they will care about each other's rights."

"Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Englishmen began building houses on the east coast of this warm land of curious life and unknown vastness. They had selected, more by luck than exploration, the banks of a magnificent harbour, a place which posterity generally recognized as one of the best sites in the world."

"The Romans were better than the Greeks at fighting. They were better than the Greeks at law, which they used to run their empire. They were better than the Greeks at engineering, which was useful both for fighting and running an empire. But in everything else they acknowledged that the Greeks were superior and slavishly copied them."

"When the Germans invaded the Roman Empire they did not intend to destroy it. They were coming for plunder, to get the best lands and to settle down and enjoy the good things of life. They were happy to acknowledge the emperor’s rule. But the trouble was that in the 400s so many Germans came, and took so much land, there was nothing left for the emperor to control. In effect the Roman Empire came to an end because there was nothing left to rule."

"European civilisation is unique because it is the only civilisation which has imposed itself on the rest of the world. It did this by conquest and settlement; by its economic power; by the power of its ideas; and because it had things that everyone else wanted. Today every country on earth uses the discoveries of science and the technologies that flow from it, and science was a European invention."

"The Enlightenment was not a revolutionary movement; it was not even a political movement. It was a collection of scholars, writers, artists and historians who believed that as reason and education spread, superstition and ignorance would fall away and people would cease to believe in such nonsense as miracles or kings ruling by God’s permission."

"New South Wales did not begin as a penal colony; it is better to think of it beginning as a colony of convicts... Why wasn't early New South Wales a penal colony? The short answer is that British officials in 1786 could not conceive of such a beast: a society of wardens and prisoners designed for punishment and control, as the French ran much later on Devil's Island."

"Economic growth in Australia did not require the incorporation of a backward, unproductive rural sector. When farming later developed on the pastoral runs, it was commercial farming. Australia, as its greatest historian Keith Hancock said, was born modern. The United States, by contrast, imitated to an extent the history of Europe. In areas which had been self-sufficient there was more regional variety in speech and habit. There were pockets of settlement which for a long time remained outside the commercial world, even when access to it became possible. Backwoodsmen, hillbillies and country music were the results."

"In Australia by 1890, the rate of union membership in the workforce had become the highest in the world. Was this because pay and conditions in Australia were the worst? No; it was because they were the best. Workers who lived in a society that had already yielded so much to them were confident that it could yield much more."

"His rise to the status of Republican presidential candidate will stand as a unique historic achievement."

"By winning his party’s nomination, Trump has rewritten the rules. Until this year, no openly racist candidate in modern times has reached such a height in American national politics. Trump has carelessly, perhaps jubilantly, maligned Mexicans and Muslims. ... His success results from sheer intuition. He realized, as others did not, that there are many thousands of people ready to vote for a candidate preaching anti-Mexican, anti-Muslin bigotry, while also blaming America’s failures on the Chinese and on free trade."

"Isolationism as a stream of thought was hibernating. It was rarely articulated, but passionately held, waiting for someone like Trump to lead it. Isolationists were called the “silent majority” in Richard Nixon’s days — even though Nixon was an internationalist, who built a strong relationship with China. Trump knew how to exploit the silent majority’s mix of racism, grievances and xenophobia. He appealed to the vast national community of chronic blamers, anxious to locate the cause of American problems in China, thereby executing a double play of racism and xenophobia."

"In truth, modern life requires many people of talent and intelligence to run big institutions, including governments. Others resent their quality wherever they find it. They see it as oppressive. Then Donald Trump came before them and sneered at government leadership, in a style that had nothing to do with talent or intelligence.... To accomplish this, his followers needed only to mark a ballot. Soon he looked like the man they always needed. In the future, this strategy may well be called Trumpism. For now, American journalists call it populism."

"A fundamental change is taking place in the nature and application of technology in business, a change with profound and far-reaching implications for companies of every size and shape. A multimillion dollar research program conducted by the DMR Group, Inc., studied more than 4,500 organizations in North America, Europe, and the Far East to investigate the nature and impact of changes in technology. The synthesis and analysis of this information indicate that information technology is going through its first paradigm shift. Driven by the demands of the competitive business environment and profound changes in the nature of computers, the information age is evolving into a second era. Computing platforms in most organizations today are not able to deliver the goods for corporate rebirth. It is only through open network computing that the open networked client/server enterprise can be achieved. In nontechnical language this book shows managers and professionals how to take immediate action for the short-term benefits of the new technology while positioning their organizations for long-term growth and transformation..."

"Industrial capitalism brought representative democracy, but with a weak public mandate and inert citizenry. The digital age offers a new democracy based on public deliberation and active citizenship."

"Collaboration is important not just because it's a better way to learn. The spirit of collaboration is penetrating every institution and all of our lives. So learning to collaborate is part of equipping yourself for effectiveness, problem solving, innovation and life-long learning in an ever-changing networked economy."

"Just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government, it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion, and even insurrection."

"Technology doesn’t create prosperity any more than it destroys privacy."

"Every ten minutes, like the heartbeat of the bitcoin network, all the transactions conducted are verified, cleared, and stored in a block which is linked to the preceding block, thereby creating a chain."

"In this book, you’ll read dozens of stories about initiatives enabled by this trust protocol that create new opportunities for a more prosperous world. Prosperity first and foremost is about one’s standard of living."

"Imagine instead of the centralized company Airbnb, a distributed application—call it blockchain Airbnb or bAirbnb—essentially a cooperative owned by its members. When a renter wants to find a listing, the bAirbnb software scans the blockchain for all the listings and filters and displays those that meet her criteria. Because the network creates a record of the transaction on the blockchain, a positive user review improves their respective reputations and establishes their identities—now without an intermediary."

"Distributed ledger technology can liberate many financial services from the confines of old institutions, fostering competition and innovation. That’s good for the end user. Even when connected to the old Internet, billions of people are excluded from the economy for the simple reason that financial institutions don’t provide services like banking to them because they would be unprofitable and risky customers."

"(...) we’re talking about building twenty-first-century companies, some that may be massive wealth creators and powerful in their respective markets. We do think enterprises will look more like networks rather than the vertically integrated hierarchies of the industrial age. As such there is an opportunity to distribute (not redistribute) wealth more democratically."

"We look at how blockchain technologies can change what it means to be a citizen and participate in the political process, from voting and accessing social services to solving some of society’s big hairy problems and holding elected representatives accountable for the promises that got them elected."

"Today, both of us are excited about the potential of this next round of the Internet. We’re enthusiastic about the massive wave of innovation that is being unleashed and its potential for prosperity and a better world. This book is our case to you to become interested, understand this next wave, and take action to ensure that the promise is fulfilled."

"We believe that blockchain technology could be an important tool for protecting and preserving humanity and the rights of every human being, a means of communicating the truth, distributing prosperity, and—as the network rejects the fraudulent transactions—of rejecting those early cancerous cells from a society that can grow into the unthinkable."

"If we design for integrity, power, value, privacy, security, rights, and inclusion, then we will be redesigning our economy and social institutions to be worthy of trust. We now turn our attention to how this could roll out and what you should consider doing."

"Rather than simply regulating, governments can improve the behavior of industries by making them more transparent and boosting civic engagement—not as a substitute for better regulation but as a complement to the existing systems. We believe effective regulation and, by extension, effective governance come from a multistakeholder approach where transparency and public participation are valued more highly and weigh more heavily in decision making."

"Blockchain technology may reduce the costs and size of government, but we’ll still need new Laws in many areas. There are technological and business model solutions to the challenges of intellectual property and rights ownership. So we should be rewriting or trashing old laws that stifle innovation through overprotection of patents. Better antitrust action must stem the trend toward monopolies so that no one overpays for, say, basic Internet or financial services."

"I'm the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be."

"I think there’s more going on here between these two guys, honestly. And, um… I’m not trying to be— I’m just being honest and blunt. But I don’t know. I suspected, and now I really have serious— I think that Shawn and Vince were sleeping with each other. I honestly— I’m not… I’m just telling you. I think I’m very close to the truth here."

"You know if Bret Hart went to bed in a hotel and he asks for a wakeup call at 1:23 in the morning. The guy will come in and say "It's 1 2 3." I bet he'll kick out of bed."

"Vince: (Jerry Lawler has Bret Hart up against the ringpost) We saw Doink earlier ram Bret's leg into the ringpost, now what's Lawler going to do? (Lawler crotches Bret against the post) Oh no!"

"Bobby: (High voice) Oh it's going to happen to Bret the hitman Hart."

"Vince: Stop it Bobby Heenan!"

"(On Bret's sunglasses gift to fans at ringside)"

"Heenan: See, if the father is smart, he should tell her "I'll keep it for you'. Then, at Christmas, give it to her. She'll think it came from her dad. It works all the time."

"Savage: Yeah, Christmas in your family must be real, real special."

"Heenan: It is. You should see what they get me."

"I’m what C.S. Lewis would call a ʽMere Christianʼ, and all of my two books are very, very much meant to be from the point of view of what C.S. Lewis called ‘Mere Christianity’, meaning that I don’t touch upon anything at all where Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians differ, they express just the basics of the faith, from a basic, ecumenical Christian viewpoint. They only talk about the Christian faith that they have agreement on."

"I was an atheist most of my life and now I am a God-fearing Catholic, because of the miracle of life. And I'm pro-life. Amongst my peers abortion is cool, it's like, empowering, and they make jokes about it. Some of my best friends go, "I accept that it's murder and I am pro-choice." That's the world I live in."

"I worked alongside McInnes at the start of Vice in 1994, becoming the magazine’s editor shortly after it moved from Montreal to New York in 1999. Though McInnes immediately struck me as someone to avoid outside of work, nothing then indicated he would hatch an organization as vitriolic and violence-prone as the street-brawling Proud Boys. He and I were never friends. Founding editor Suroosh Alvi—who remains at Vice Media with the title of founder—brought me on board as a writer at the same time as McInnes. And when I stepped down in early 2001, it was largely because of McInnes’s toxic attitude."

"Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous."

"El que aquí cuenta lo que vio y le ocurrió no es aquel que lo vio y al que le ocurrió."

"Un imbécil detectivesco es un imbécil listo, un imbécil lógico, los peores, porque la lógica de los hombres, en vez de compensar su imbecilidad, la duplica y la triplica y la hace ofensiva."

"Nos condenamos siempre por lo que decimos, no por lo que hacemos."

"...sabe más de sí misma, que es el conocimiento que hace atractivas a las personas."

"Para mí este territorio es territorio de paso, pero se trata de un paso lo bastante dilatado para que deba procurarme lo que se llama un amor mientras estoy aquí."

"Los amores pasados siempre ofenden a los amantes nuevos, por muy muertos que estén aquéllos."

"La fidelidad (lo que así se llama para referirse a la constancia y exclusividad con que un determinado sexo penetra o es penetrado por otro igualmente determinado, o se abstiene de ser penetrado o penetrar en otros) es producto de la costumbre principalmente, como lo es también la llamada—contrariamente— infidelidad (la inconstancia y alternación y el abarcamiento de más de un sexo)."

"...y lo que me hace levantarme por las mañanas sigue siendo la espera de lo que está por llegar y no se anuncia, es la espera de lo inesperado, y no ceso de fantasear con lo que ha de venir."

"Todo lo que nos sucede, todo lo que hablamos o nos es relatado, cuanto vemos con nuestros propios ojos o sale de nuestra lengua o entra por nuestros oídos, todo aquello a lo que asistimos (y de lo cual, por tanto, somos algo responsables), ha de tener un destinatario fuera de nosotros mismos, y a ese destinatario lo vamos seleccionando en función de lo que acontece o nos dicen o bien decimos nosotros."

"La noche pertenece al día anterior en nuestro sentimiento."

"La gente sólo se casa cuando no tiene más remedio, por pánico o porque anda desesperada o para no perder a alguien a quien no soporta perder. Siempre hay mucha chaladura en lo que parece más convencional."

"La verdadera unidad de los matrimonios y aun de las parejas la traen las palabras, más que las palabras dichas—dichas voluntariamente—, las palabras que no se callan—que no se callan sin que nuestra voluntad intervenga—."

"Toda enfermedad viene causada por algo que no es una enfermedad."

"Lo más intolerable es que se convierta en pasado quien uno recuerda como futuro."

"Todo está ahí a la vista, en realidad todo es visible desde muy pronto en las relaciones como en los relatos honrados, basta con atreverse a mirarlo, un solo instante encierra el germen de muchos años venideros y casi de nuestra historia entera."

"Le quedaban por conocer muchas noches en las que sucumbiría a mujeres que su avidez y el alcohol le harían juzgar deseables, para llevarse a la mañana siguiente las manos a la cabeza al descubrir que se había metido en la cama con descomedidas parientes de Oliver Hardy o con casquivanas émulas de Bela Lugosi."

"A veces resulta imposible explicar lo más decisivo, lo que más nos ha afectado, y guardar silencio es lo único que nos salva en lo malo, porque las explicaciones suenan casi siempre algo tontas respecto al daño que uno hace o le han hecho."

"Tendemos a desconfiar increíblemente de nuestras percepciones cuando ya son pasado y no se ven confirmadas ni ratificadas desde fuera por nadie, renegamos de nuestra memoria a veces y acabamos por contarnos inexactas versiones de lo que presenciamos, no nos fiamos como testigos ni de nosotros mismos."

"Las mentiras son las mentiras, pero todo tiene su tiempo para ser creído."

"...al mantener el brazo en alto me permitió contemplar su axila, y cuando una mujer desnuda permite ver eso, y descubre una o ambas, es como si ofreciera un suplemento de desnudez con ello."

"Todo insiste y continúa solo, aunque opte uno por retirarse."

"...y un poco más tarde viene la pregunta que nadie se hace antes de obrar ni antes de hablar: ‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’, porque todo el mundo se atreve a ello, a turbar el universo y a molestarlo, con sus rápidas y pequeñas lenguas y con sus mezquinos pasos."

"Tenía capacidad para sorprender, como todos los imbéciles mayúsculos, y por supuesto para irritar de nuevo en un solo segundo."

"No desdeñes nunca las ideas imaginativas, Jack, a ellas se llega sólo después de mucho pensamiento, de mucha reflexión y mucho estudio, y de notable atrevimiento."

"It's impossible not to admire a person who devoted his life to his ideas."

"What good have all of Arafat’s compromises done for the Palestinian people? What came out of the recognition of Israel, of the settling for a on 22 percent of the territory, of the negotiations with Zionism and the United States? Nothing but the entrenchment of the Israeli occupation and the strengthening and massive development of the settlement project. In retrospect, it makes sense to think that if that's how things were, maybe it would have been better to follow the uncompromising path taken by Habash, who for most of his life didn't agree to any negotiations with Israel, who believed that with Israel it was only possible to negotiate by force, who thought Israel would only change its positions if it paid a price, who dreamed of a single, democratic and of equal rights and refused to discuss anything but that. Unfortunately, Habash was right. It's hard to know what would have happened had the Palestinians followed his path, but it's impossible not to admit that the alternative has been a resounding failure."

"A war was on. ... On July 14 he was expelled from his home with the rest of his family. He never returned to the city he loved. He never forgot the scenes of in 1948, nor did he forget the idea of violent resistance. Can the Israeli reader understand how he felt?"

"Not much is left of his ideas. What has come of the scientific idealism and the politicization of the masses, the class struggle and the , the and of course the transformation of the struggle against Israel into an armed struggle, which according to the plans was supposed to develop from into a national war of liberation? Fifty years after the founding of the PFLP and 10 years after the death of its founder, what remains? Habash's successor, , was assassinated by Israel in 2001; his successor’s successor, Ahmad Saadat, has been in an Israeli prison since 2006 and very little remains of the PFLP. During all my decades covering the Israeli occupation, the most impressive figures I met belonged to the PFLP, but now not much remains except fragments of dreams. The PFLP is a negligible minority in intra-Palestinian politics, a movement that once thought to demand equal power with and its leader, Arafat. And the occupation? It's strong and thriving and its end looks further off than ever. If that isn’t failure, what is?"

"I felt very sorry that I had not met this man."

"The continued detention of Palestinian parliament member can no longer be presented as a worrisome exception on Israel’s democratic landscape. Nor can the incredible public apathy and almost total absence of media coverage of her plight be dismissed any longer as a general lack of interest in what Israel does to the Palestinians. The usual repression and denial cannot explain it either. Jarrar’s detention doesn’t only define what is happening in Israel’s dark backyard, it is part of its glittering display window. Jarrar defines democracy and the in Israel. Her imprisonment is an inseparable part of the Israeli regime and it is the face of Israeli democracy, no less than its free elections (for some of its subjects) or the pride parades that wind through its streets. Jarrar is the Israeli regime no less than the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty. Jarrar is Israeli democracy without makeup and adornments. The lack of interest in her fate is also characteristic of the regime. A legislator in prison through no fault of her own is a political prisoner in every way, and political prisoners defined by the regime. There can be no political prisoners in a democracy, nor detention without trial in a state of law. Thus Jarrar’s imprisonment is not only a black stain on the Israeli regime; it’s an inseparable part of it."

"She is perhaps the bravest woman living today under Israeli control."

"Jarrar could end up spending the rest of her life in prison; there is no legal impediment to this since all the pathetic arguments used to justify her continued detention could be deemed valid indefinitely. If she’s dangerous today, she’s dangerous forever. Political prisoners, detention without trial and unlimited imprisonment define tyranny."

"The resistance should no longer be directed solely against the occupation. The resistance is to the regime in place in Israel. Her imprisonment is the regime and she opposes the regime under whose boots she lives."

"All those who support her continued detention, anyone who is silent while she remains in jail, and all those who make her detention possible are saying: Forget democracy. That’s not what we are. Get used to it."

"The greatest threat facing Israel is the democratic threat. There is no greater danger to the regime in Israel than its turning into a democracy. There is no society that opposes democracy like Israeli society. There are plenty of regimes opposed to democracy, but not a free society. In Israel the people, the sovereign, is opposed to democracy. This is why the current struggle, which presumes to be about democracy, is a masquerade."

"When Israelis start asking themselves if they really want to continue living like this, alternatives will pop up. There are no miracle solutions and no guarantees of success. There's only one thing for sure: The alternatives have never been tried. We never thought about acting with self-control and restraint. It's for the weak. We never asked what's the outcome of all the killings and the assassinations. We never probed whether these wars contributed anything to our security, or whether they only fractured it. Now the jihad is already coming at Tel Aviv, and from under siege. One day people will learn to appreciate the determination and courage of those who managed to establish such a resistance force while inside a cage, even if we continue to scream and scream "murderous organizations.""

"Sedil Naghniyeh, 15, was standing on the roof of her house in the Jenin refugee camp with her father Adnan to watch the goings-on. An IDF soldier shot her in the head as her father looked on and on Wednesday she succumbed to her wounds... Sedil was a pretty girl, born and raised in the Jenin camp. Her father is the maintenance director of the camp’s Freedom Theater. The theater’s former director, Jonathan Stanchek, an Israeli now residing in Sweden, mourned Sedil on Wednesday. Her family had been his close neighbors during the 10 years he and his family lived in the camp.... Stanchek says he never heard the father utter an angry word at the Jews or the Israelis, even though three times they tore down his house, his brother had been killed, his son is in prison and on Wednesday his daughter died."

"When the next war is over Maj. [Shira] Eting will again come to the city square and speak passionately about values, freedom and equality. Then she will be interviewed again by Stahl, who was moved to tears by the principled pilot, and will tell her how much easier it is to kill children under a center-left government. When it orders pilots to bomb, they will do so without batting an eyelash, as they did in Operation Cast Lead (344 children killed) and in Operation Protective Edge (518 children, 180 of them 5 or younger. Who killed the 180 young children? Eting and her comrades. They did so in Protective Edge under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Chief of Staff Benny Gantz and in Cast Lead under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi"

"(An audience member wanted to raise a point of information.) No, no. I need to solve here an occupation of 50 years in 10 minutes and you'll take two minutes of (my time)?"

"There is the view that during the Cold War, Pakistan was the most allied ally and then, within the space of just a few months, we became America's most sanctioned friend."

"Instead of constantly talking about motivation, organizations should ensure that employees are occasionally delighted."

"Everyone has a ‘reservoir of talent'. Intuition, interests and skills form the foundation of talents. These talents are indicators of your calling. The best way to ensure long-term job satisfaction is to act on that calling."

"Ways to combat stress, such as playing golf before a conference call or taking a break on the beach during inventory, are essential."

"On-the-job democracy isn't just a lofty concept but a better, more profitable way to do things. We all demand democracy in every other aspect of our lives and culture. People are considered adults in their private lives, at the bank, at their children's schools, with family and among friends--so why are they suddenly treated like adolescents at work? Why can't workers be involved in choosing their own leaders? Why shouldn't they manage themselves? Why can't they speak up--challenge, question, share information openly?"

"I believe the old way of doing business is dying, and the sooner it's dead and buried the better off we all will be."

"One, the people in charge wanting to give up control. This tends to eliminate some 80 percent of businesspeople. Two, a profound belief that humankind will work toward its best version, given freedom; that would eliminate the other 20 percent."

"I always come back to variations of the question that my son asked me when he was three. We were sitting in a jacuzzi, and he said, "Dad, why do we exist?" There is no other question. Nobody has any other question. We have variations of this one question, from three onwards. So when you spend time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an organization and you're saying, boy -- how many people do you know who on their death beds said, boy, I wish I had spent more time at the office? So there's a whole thing of having the courage now -- not in a week, not in two months, not when you find out you have something -- to say, no, what am I doing this for? Stop everything. Let me do something else. And it will be okay, it will be much better than what you're doing, if you're stuck in a process."

"The opposite of work is idleness. But very few of us know what to do with idleness. When you look at the way that we distribute our lives in general, you realize that in the periods in which we have a lot of money, we have very little time. And then when we finally have time, we have neither the money nor the health."

"And so, what we've done all of these years is very simple, is use the little tool, which is ask three whys in a row. Because the first why you always have a good answer for. The second why, it starts getting difficult. By the third why, you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing."

"Companies think that they are modern because they have painted their walls in a bright colour or they allow people to bring their dogs to work. This is silly and millennial-washing. The idea is to bring in the mature generation and get them to mentor the co-work with the younger generation from a distance."

"What makes Ricardo Semler all the more notable is the way he has put theory into practice. Many people have talked the talk of corporate democracy; his company walks the walk."

"Semler is perhaps the best, low-profile CEO in business today – and Semco is no ordinary company."

"The management style that Ricardo Semler evolved through decades of experimentation at Brazilian firm Semco proved to be massively successful. The company defied gravity with the rate of its growth, even when the rest of the country was suffering savage recession. And yet, for all that, it is an example that few have attempted to follow. Why? Because it mostly revolves around management giving up control."

"Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler doesn’t believe in rules. At least, he doesn’t believe companies need to impose a host of strict guidelines in order to run efficiently. In fact, he thinks employees will work better if they don’t have to report their vacation days or be told what to wear. He wants to dissolve what he calls the “boarding school aspects” of business, just to see what happens."

"Pakistan, its namaaz-raising hands dipped in the blood of Hindus and Sikhs, began as an Islamic terrorist State and continues to live up to its foundational values. Take it from Balasaheb and me: nothing will emerge from the latest "hand of friendship." Unless, of course, it is Kargil II."

"Which American values can, even remotely, be called Islamic? Democracy? Freedom? Equality? Secularism? Gender equity? Freedom of thought? The right to free expression? The right to critique any holy cow? Does even one of these values exist in a single Islamic state…? Is even one of these values extended to all Muslim citizens of an Islamic state?…What would be the fate of Hindus working in Saudi Arabia if they should advocate the replacement of the word "Islamic" with "Islamic-Hindu" in all references to the kingdom’s heritage?"

"You’ll be pleased to know that you ‘secularists’ have a successful and time-tested way of tackling free speech: I am no longer writing for Rediff since its top honcho, Ajit Balakrishnan (also involved with discredited SABRANG communications Communalism Combat, ), finds me ‘very inflammatory.’ That’s surely something to rejoice over."

"This, my friends, is the Jaziya that non-Muslims pay in "free" India, one governed by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Hajpayee."

"Vajpayee's additional generosity to Muslim pilgrims earned him, in Varsha Bhosle's unsparing satirical columns, the alias Hajpayee."

"I've always loved life. Those who love life can never adapt, undergo, be commanded. Who loves life is always with the rifle at the window to defend life ... A human being who adapts, who suffers, who makes himself commanded, is not a human being."

"Being one of the few women in the leadership team, I am often surrounded by men, but I have never found that to be uncomfortable."

"“In spite of the ruins and death, where every illusion has ended, the strength of my dreams is so strong, that exaltation is reborn from everything, and my hands are never empty.""

"“Spelling is relevant knowledge.""

"“Spelling is not an artificial skin of verbal expression, it is a deep structure that is revealed in the spelled image.""

"Political problem requires political solution."

"Canada harbours its own disgraceful legacy. Down through the decades, scores of federal and provincial laws isolated, dispossessed and ghettoized one racial or ethnic minority after another. Asians weren't allowed to vote in Canada until the late 1940s; federally-registered Indians had to wait until 1960... For Canada’s young Aboriginal people, it’s not clear that the arc of the moral universe is even bending in their direction at all."

"have no recourse to anything like an . The Communist Party decides if you’re guilty or innocent. The conviction rate stands in excess of 98 per cent. Torture and are commonplace. Xi has lately embarked on a vicious campaign of harassment and intimidation of activists, ethnic and religious minorities, and feminists. Scores of human rights lawyers have been rounded up and jailed."

"In these impoverished conditions, it's much easier for journalists to construe events in such a way as to uphold an ideologically rigid "narrative" than to go about the hard work of building true stories from the construction material of hard facts."

"There is something very strange and new and different that is occupying all the places where the left used to be and so these stories, it didn't really matter that they weren't true but they were weaponized, if you like, in this narrative about Canada as an irredeemably racist white colonial apartheid settler state."

"What I worry about is that the truth doesn't matter, and I think this is something that has changed from 20 years ago, it's not just that the truth doesn't matter anymore, it's that it doesn't matter that the truth doesn't matter anymore. [...] I also think that people really do want some kind of an honest assessment of things that are important. Of something grounded in fact. I think that is something that is actually necessary for a liberal democracy to function."

"I think we have to make a very important distinction between belief and knowledge. And this is something that I think is lost these days, particularly in the news media. There's actually a difference between (and we should draw attention to it when it's transgressed) [...] what we know [and] what we're expected to believe, or told to believe."

"The true test of a democracy is the justice that the minority gets in the system. The majority will always get its share whatever the system."

"It is extremely symbolic that Advani is the heir of Nathuram Godse who, in pursuit of what he was convinced was his duty to India, shot dead the man who had chanted the name of Ram all his life till his last breath."

"Just as Hitler had given a frustrated Germany a target and that target was the Jew, so through the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, a frustrated country was given a target and that target was the Muslim."

"Jihad is the signature tune of Islamic history. If today’s Muslim rulers are reluctant to sound that note, it is often because they are concerned about the consequences of failure."

"There is no pain in life, they say in Granada, so cruel as to be blind in Alhambra. When the Arabs of the desert conquered Spain, they said that they had reached heaven. From the ramparts of the Alhambra, sitting on a spur of the Sierra Nevada, look out and you see a paradise created by nature; look in and you see a paradise created by man."

"Narrated Abdullah bin Abi Aufa: Allah’s Messenger (May Peace Be Upon Him) said, ‘Know that Paradise is under the shade of swords’."

"While the landlords and capitalists allowed the clergy to make Pakistan a religious state, the clergy allowed the landlords guaranteed property rights and the capitalists unbridled control over the economy. Theocracy and landlordism/capitalism are the two pillars of Pakistan and Bangladesh."

"When most people think of nature, they want to look for perfection and for symmetry and balance, ... But if you really pay attention you are going to see that what actually makes nature tick are the imbalances, the imperfections, the asymmetries."

"...Our spiritual attachment to nature transcends religion, being part of our innermost nature as a thinking species in a mysterious cosmos."

"Science treads in the same footsteps of our ancestors, answering to our longing to understand where we fit in as we look up to the sky."

"Not surprisingly, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil scientists understood quite well the mechanisms of climate change and its broad implications for the oil business."

"I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. "I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe." Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, "Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that." And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," and all that. This positions me very much against all of the "New Atheist" guys."

"Behind every dish there is death, and people only close their own eyes to it."

"I believe that cuisine is the most important link between nature and culture."

"I never taught of book burning, no matter how they were silly, mendacious or propaganda-like because I guide myself by the principle that every book burning was just an introduction to burning (of people) at the stake."

"If we go for the one state solution, we are endangering ourselves as Jews twice. Once, we are endangering the Jewish majority. There is a great democratic controversy. I don't want to get into it. Carolyn writes about it. Let me speak about where we know the numbers. Israel itself, sovereign Israel, right now we're already down to a 75% Jewish majority in Israel. In 2025, we're talking about 70%. If you were to add even one million, I think there are 3 million, but if you add one million Arabs, we will either stop being Jewish, or stopping democratic. If we do not give full rights to these Palestinians we will not be democratic. If we do, we would go down to levels of a Jewish majority that is fragile."

"The Sanskrit word ‘maya’ refers to all things that can be measured. Human understanding of the world is limited, hence measurable, hence maya. To believe this maya is truth is delusion. Beyond maya, beyond human values and human judgements, beyond the current understanding of the world, is a limitless reality which makes room for everyone and everything. That reality is God."

"The Goddess is Maya, embodiment of all delusions. She is Shakti, personification of energy. She is Adi, primal, as ancient and boundless as the soul...The embodiment of Adi- Maya-Shakti – Durga is the invincible one. She is at once bride and warrior. The one establishes home, provides pleasure, produces children and offers food."

"The Tantrik approach to self-realization is different from the Vedic approach. The former looks upon the Goddess as Shakti, energy, to be experienced while the latter looks upon the Goddess as Maya, delusion, to be transcended. The former is more sensory, the latter less so."

"Though in Bengal and Orissa, some say, Alakshmi is visualized as an owl seated beside Lakshmi, Alakshmi is a secret goddess, invisible to all. The only way to see her is to have Saraswati, goddess of knowledge and good sense by your side. But Lakshmi will never let Saraswati stay in the same house as her. She will go wherever there is Saraswati and kick her out, making room for Alakshmi. Why does she do that, one wonders. But then one is told that Lakshmi is a whimsical goddess, she does not like to stay in one place too long. By kicking Saraswati out and by getting Alakshmi in, she ensures there is a fight in the house and when there is a fight, wealth invariably moves out of a house."

"The standard trope in modern historical studies seems to be that Hindu temples were destroyed not only by Muslim rulers but also by Hindu rulers as part of establishing their authority. It disregards all Hindu memory and Islamic writing that shows motivation of Muslim rulers at its core was religious, designed to replace the Hindu faith with Islam. This is aligned with Western academic anxiety at being seen as Islamophobic – no points lost if one is Hinduphobic."

"Despite their deep knowledge of Hinduism, neither Elst nor Frawley, neither Doniger nor Pollock, believe in letting go and moving on, which is the hallmark of Hindu thought, often deemed as a feminine trait. Instead, Elst and Frawley keep drawing attention to injustice done by colonisers, goading Indians to rise up and fight, a violent tendency that is the hallmark of Western thought, often deemed as a masculine trait... Elst and Frawley follow the Abrahamic mythic pattern that establishes them as ‘prophets’ leading the enslaved – colonised – Indians back to the ‘Vedic Promised Land’."

"Ram's calm repose in the face of all adversity, so evident in the Ramayan, has made him worthy of veneration, adoration and worship. Ram's story has reached the masses not through erudite Sanskrit texts but through theatre song and dance performed in local languages. All of these retellings of Ramayan have their own turns and twists, their own symbolic outpouring, each one valid in their respective contexts."

"The Ramayan, one of the most revered texts in Hinduism, tells the story of a prince called Ram. Dashrath, king of Ayodhya, had three wives but no children. So he conducted a yagna and invoked the gods who gave him a magic potion that was divided among his three queens. In time the queens gave birth to four sons. Ram was the eldest, born of the chief queen, Kaushalya, Bharat was the second born to Dasharath’s favourite queen Kaikeyi. Lakshman and Shatrughna were the twin sons of the third queen Sumitra."

"The twentieth century saw Ram on celluloid with films like Bharat Milap (1942), Ram Rajya (1943 film) andSati Sulochana (1961). Ramanand Sagar's television serial Ramayan, with Arun Govil starring as Ram, made history in the late 1980s."

"The Ramayan also happens to be part of the Mahabharata, dated between 300 BCE and 300 CE, where it is called the Ramopakhyan. When the Pandavas bemoaned their thirteen years of forest exile, Rishi Markandeya retorted by telling them how Ram suffered for fourteen years and while the Pandavas deserved their punishment for gambling away their kingdom, Ram did not deserve his fate – he was simply obesing his father."

"Even equality is a deeply problematic concept. It has its origins in Christianity, where it is conceived as equality before God. When you transfer that into a competitive commercial society, it becomes elusive, even deceptive. Really, the drama of the modern world is the collision between the promise of equality and the fact of structural inequality…"

"Supremacy of all stripes—racial, ethnic, national—works in insidious ways, burrowing deep inside impeccably liberal minds…"

"As a writer I am more interested in describing the past accurately than in outlining the future; we need a new past if we are to make sense of our intolerable present or work to change it…"

"Writing about Kashmir was a strange and painfully isolating experience, but an absolutely crucial one. It made me see that, whether you are Indian or American, black, brown, or white, it is best not to get morally intoxicated by words like "secularism" and "liberalism" or to simply assume that you stand on the right side of history after having professed allegiance to certain ideological verities. Rather one should try to perceive the scramble for power, the clash of interests, that these resonant claims to virtue conceal; one should ask who is using words like "secularism" or "liberalism" and for what purposes…"

"Governments around the world say they're engaged in a war against the coronavirus. [...] This kill-or-die idiom is more than casual rhetorical overkill. Many governments are symbolically but very deliberately calling, in this time of fear and uncertainty, for general along military lines. This is so they can, while pointing to an insidious foreign enemy, aim their firepower against some of the most valuable institutions of domestic public life. They have been very successful so far."

"The public broadcaster's critique of the government was stinging in part because Johnson enjoys a high degree of support among Britain’s privately owned, overwhelmingly pro-Tory press. Nor does Modi, assured of craven public broadcasters, expect much criticism from the , which has been described, only semi-humorously, as veritably North Korean in its devotion to the supreme leader."

"In addition to economic and military , wartime measures typically encourage a high degree of political, social and intellectual conformity. The general idea is that, in the face of an existential challenge from a vicious enemy, ought to cease. The media tends to become more patriotic, as do former . Such was the case in the United States during the early stages of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, when most journalists and even Democratic politicians rallied around the Republican George W. Bush administration. The trouble is that the "war" against Covid-19 is actually not a war at all. And no one should feel obliged to sign up for it. The loss of, and separation from, loved ones, and the fear and anxiety that is devastating many lives is not an opportunity to fantasize about heroism in battle. The pandemic is, primarily, a global public health emergency; it is made potentially lethal as much by long neglected and underfunded social welfare systems as by a highly contagious virus. A plain description like this is not as stirring as a call to arms — and doesn't justify the more extreme actions governments have taken against critics during the crisis. It does, however, open up a line of inquiry that journalists ought to pursue, now as well as in the future."

"Awakening late to the pandemic, authoritarian or authoritarian-minded leaders have turned it into an opportunity both to shore up their power and to conceal their stunning ineptitude. To fail to see through their manufactured , as many in the media are doing, can only further endanger the long-term moral and political health of their societies."

"Humanity has its weaknesses, and woman is perhaps the weakness of man!"

"It's not men's places that women claim, but their own place in a modern society."

"If the young terrorists had a mother with a heart full of love, they would not think of making the revolution, but to build in this country that does not lack corners to exploit". Editor's note: Chronicle published in following the assassination of Quebec Minister Pierre Laporte."

"Mom gives life in every way."

"Women's participation is more than words to take action."

"In this century of violent violence in all parts of the world, it is almost ridiculous to ask people to be thankful, but women must continue to teach their children to be thankful... saying to appreciate the smallest thing that comes from others for free."

"The simplicity of the generous gesture can give a joy of living to those who need it so much."

"You know that there is a time to do one thing and another time to enjoy it."

"Every intelligent woman knows how to be free."

"Smile to life this morning and be assured, ma'am, that this life will make you smile. The present belongs to the optimists."

"The earth does not stop turning, because you are unhappy, as well swallowing your tears and smiling, even if the pain is still burning."

"In education, there are almost no more immutable rules."

"If moms know how to keep open the line that connects them to the friendship of their children, they will learn that today's young people are great!"

"What joys are not felt by people who continually give their good mood..."

"Why not celebrate parents and not separate the holidays from dads and moms?"

"Man has never proved his strength by the goods he possesses, but rather by the generous help he can bring to society."

"The woman, who does not imitate her mother and her grandmother as a mother and a good wife, can only rely on her own scale of values ​​to find a life ideal that is important to her happiness."

"It is certain that in order to dialogue, one must, at the beginning, have an open mind."

"This society so harsh, so inhuman, it is composed of you and me... What are we doing to help the other one?"

"Funny time when most of the poor and disinherited parts of the world could live what the other party leaves on his plate ... And we continue to sing the joy, the peace, the love ... do we really believe?"

"We need succession in career women's clubs. The younger generation of women helps us to be more aware of how our world is changing."

"Graduate studies are not only, today, the key golden men."

"Forget what hurt you, it's a recipe for youth, health and happiness ..."

"If children find life hard, they find that the family still has its good side."

"“the word Hindutva is being used as a term of abuse […] it is used mostly in pejorative terms […] the debate appears no longer confined to the cloistered world of priests, or even the self-serving one of politics, it has expanded into a challenge to Hindu civilisation […] the wider attack on Indian civilisation that this pejorative use of the word Hindu represents. It bothers me that I went to school and college in this country without any idea of the enormous contribution of Hindu civilisation to the history of the world. It bothers me that even today our children, whether they go to state schools or expensive private ones, come out without any knowledge of their own culture or civilisation […] You cannot be proud of a heritage you know nothing about, and in the name of secularism, we have spent 50 years in total denial of the Hindu roots of this civilisation. We have done nothing to change a colonial system of mass education founded on the principle that Indian civilisation had nothing to offer […] our contempt for our culture and civilisation […] evidence of a country that continues to be colonised to the core? Our contempt for who we are gets picked up these days by the Western press […] racism [is] equated with Hindu Nationalism. For countries that gave us slavery and apartheid that really is rich, but who can blame them when we think so badly of ourselves. As for me I would like to state clearly that I believe that the Indic religions have made much less trouble for the world than the Semitic ones and that Hindu civilisation is something I am very proud of. If that is evidence of my being ‘communal’, then, so my inner voice tells me, so be it.”"

"Are there no limits to what Muslims can demand, and get away with, in the imagined cause of their religion? ... There is no reason why our political leaders should have to start kowtowing and running scared everytime a bunch of semi-literate mullahs gets up and starts making a noise. ... We have just seen Shiv-Sena government in Maharashtra buckle under Muslim pressure and suspend the release of Mani Rattnam’s Bombay. It is a film about inter-religious marriage and the triumph of peace over communal hatred. ... After seeing the film they came up with a list of objections so absurd that they should have been considered ludicrous in our secular land but they have been taken seriously. They object, we are told, to the last shot. The Muslim girl while eloping with her Hindu husband carried the Koran in her hand. This was bad, they said, because it seemed to imply that her marriage had Islamic sanction. ... Nor did they approve of the film’s first scene which shows a woman lifting her burqa off her face.... Offence was taken, we are told, because a Hindu family was shown being burned alive. A Muslim family is also shown being similarly murdered, because this also happened in the terrible riots of 1992, but our Muslim objectors are selective in their disapproval."

"This is why it has been so astonishingly easy for the Gandhi dynasty to turn India’s oldest political party into a family firm. And once dynastic succession became acceptable at the highest levels of political power, it became impossible to prevent dynastic democracy spreading like a slow poison into the very soul of India. It spread horizontally at higher levels of leadership in every political party and vertically down to the lowest levels of grassroots democracy. It has now become almost impossible to find a village council that is free of this debilitating disease. ... India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ could more appropriately have been called India’s tryst with dynasty."

"There was disappointment in Nehru’s leadership, but it never took away from the deep regard in which he was held for decades after he died. He was credited with bequeathing to India democracy and pluralism, and if anyone challenged the achievements of Nehruvian socialism, as V.S. Naipaul did in An Area of Darkness, he was reviled."

"It was the first time an Indian prime minister had been so open about his religion and a tremor of fear went up the ‘secular’ spine of Lutyens’ Delhi. Friends who had never see the Ganga puja or Benares said that they loved the ceremony but they were worried about the message this would send to Muslims and Christians. So they readied their ammunition for the attack on Modi’s secular credentials that began within months of his becoming prime minister."

"The reason I quote this sycophantic comment is because it reflects perfectly the consensus in smoke-filled newspaper offices and in Delhi’s television studios. And Sonia, reserved to the point of being uneasy with conversation of any kind, used this to her advantage when it came to handling the media. She evolved a policy whereby she refused to talk to journalists except those who were carefully vetted as supportive and obedient. The kind that may have asked her questions about India’s stand on important international issues or big political and economic problems were never allowed near her. The media was most helpful in this exercise. In newsrooms and TV studios I seemed always to run into some editor or columnist who had just come from 10 Janpath. You could tell that they had almost before they said anything in her support. No sooner did they get that invitation to tea in 10 Janpath than hard-boiled reporters would acquire so changed an expression on their faces that jokes began to be made about how ‘one cup of tea with Sonia Gandhi could change the DNA of a journalist’."

"The English-language media is a powerful pillar in the structure that makes up that most privileged enclave called Lutyens’ Delhi. Like the bureaucrats who constitute a much more powerful pillar, most journalists had traditionally been from English-speaking, upper class India. They saw the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty as representing their class interests as much as it represented the colonized officials who inherited India from the British. The very idea of Modi was terrifying because what language would they interview him in? Would he give them interviews at all or choose Hindi journalists instead? Would the cosy relationship they had with power remain? Would their ‘idea of India’ remain intact?"

"If there is a single reason why Narendra Modi became the first prime minister in more than thirty years to get a full mandate from the people of India it was because he was the only one who understood how urgently people wanted change. The word he used most in his election speeches was the word for change in Hindi. And every time he said parivartan his audience would roar its approval. During the election campaign I came to understand that it was more important than anything else he could promise on a hot, stifling evening in Pappu’s chai shop in Benares."

"“When I go to the Vishwanath Mandir in Benares and listen to the most powerful, magical aarti I hear from the priests that the knowledge of it will probably die because the temple is now controlled by secular bureaucrats”."

"Now that the Chief Minister of Bihar has dragged 'succularism' into the political discourse, it is time to deconstruct it so that we can end this pointless debate once and for all. I have deliberately misspelt the word because when said in Hindi that is how it is usually pronounced. It is a hard word to write in devnagri and the Hindi and Urdu equivalents do not quite mean what secularism has come to mean in the Indian political context. It is a foreign word that evolved in a European context when the powers of the church and the state were separated. In India, since none of our religions were led by pontiffs who controlled armies, or had vast temporal powers, we had no need to make this separation. But, the word secularism is used in India more than almost any other country. Why? Well, because when we entered our current era of coalition governments, political parties of leftist disposition found it convenient to keep the BJP out of power by saying they would only ally with 'succular phorces'. The BJP became a pariah after the Babri Masjid came down and so whenever someone like Nitish Kumar wants to hurl abuse at the party he is in alliance with in Bihar, or one of its leaders, the 'secularism' debate gets revived."

"When I heard Aung San Suu Kyi's address to both houses of Britian's Parliament in Westminster hall last week, what impressed me was the clarity with which she spelt out her vision for her country. But, throughout her speech, something kept bothering me and by the time she finished, I discovered what it was. What bothered me was that I could not think of a single Indian leader who could make such a speech. The Indian political landscape today has become a desert in which only the stunted progeny of stunted political leaders bloom. We need our political parties to throw up real leaders and we need a political discourse in which real political problems are discussed. So can we stop fishing 'secularism' out of the dustbin of history and holding it up as a shining ideal? Its relevance faded a long time ago."

"Dynasty, a political tool in the hands of the ruling class, has become the catalyst for a new colonization of a country whose soul has already been deeply scarred by centuries of it."

"Last week I went to see Arun Jaitley. He is one of the few politicians whom I respect. I have known him from the time I was a junior reporter and can say honestly that he is one of a handful of politicians who is not in politics for personal gain but for public service. He is in the process of moving out of the house in Lutyens’ Delhi that was allotted to him as a senior minister. While waiting to see him I noticed blank spaces on the walls where pictures have been taken down. His decision to surrender his government house as soon as he demitted office is remarkable in itself. I know millionaires and maharajahs who have to be physically evicted."

"It took this election campaign for ordinary Indians to notice what was going on. They noticed because Modi told voters that they were choosing between a ‘kaamdaar’ and a ‘naamdaar’. A working man and a prince. It did not help that the ‘naamdaar’ then mocked Modi and made fun of everything about him. Modi’s ‘hugplomacy’, ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’, demonetisation. Modi’s demonetisation, he said, was done to steal their money and give it to his rich friends. The country’s Chowkidar, he said too many times, was a ‘chor’. He forgot that he was demeaning not just a political opponent but the Prime Minister of India. Ordinary voters were appalled that the heir to India’s most powerful political dynasty should talk this way. He sounded arrogant, entitled and insulting and reminded them that there were too many political heirs in Indian politics"

"It is true that in the decades in which India was ruled imperiously by the Congress, the task of writing history textbooks was allotted to Leftist historians who chose to view India’s past through a distorted lens. The most celebrated of these historians, Romila Thapar, has gone so far as to deny that Muslim invaders destroyed the temples of us idolatrous infidels. Undoubtedly, if she were writing about more recent history, she would deny that the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan — and would say that they fell to pieces of their own accord."

"The realms of high culture that in more civilised countries resonate with literature, music and art are occupied in India by Bollywood and trashy TV serials. Inevitable, since mass education is such a mess that most children leave school without learning to read a storybook. Reading is so out of fashion that most small towns in India have no bookshops, most villages have no libraries and, in our bigger cities, bookshops stock mostly books and magazines written in English. So when the RSS leaders turned up in Delhi last week to tell the Minister of Human Resource Development that they wanted changes in school education, they had a point. Unfortunately, because the RSS is led by doddering old bigots and provincial intellectuals, this ‘cultural’ organisation is in no position to give the HRD Minister worthwhile advice. The RSS leaders who met the minister reportedly confined their concerns to history books that they claim portray a ‘Western’ view of history. They demanded that these books be replaced by those written by historians with an Indian view of history. They have a point, but they make it badly. It is true that in the decades in which India was ruled imperiously by the Congress, the task of writing history textbooks was allotted to Leftist historians who chose to view India’s past through a distorted lens. The most celebrated of these historians, , has gone so far as to deny that Muslim invaders destroyed the temples of us idolatrous infidels. Undoubtedly, if she were writing about more recent history, she would deny that the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan — and would say that they fell to pieces of their own accord. In the interests of ‘secularism’, most Indian schools and colleges provide only limited courses for the study of ancient India, and Sanskrit literature. So the vast majority of Indian children grow up with a sense of being Indian that is restricted to a religious identity. When this gets infused with a toxic sort of nationalism, as happens in RSS educational institutions, the result is bigotry of a lethal kind."

"The 2014 general election marked the beginning of the end of India’s ruling elite. The election whose results came last week marked the end. As someone born and bred in this group of privileged Indians, I speak as an insider. So believe me when I tell you that we controlled everything. Politics, government, business, foreign policy, the police, the military and the media. All this was possible because we were to some degree all courtiers in the court of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty since the British left. We knew that their ‘socialism’ and ‘secularism’ were as fake as their ‘idea of India’.... If they have spent the past five years targeting Modi, often wrongly, for what they perceive as attempts to crush democracy, it is possibly because they know how easily this can be done. The truth is that the traditional ruling elite believes in an idea of India in which there are privileges and not rights. This was always a bad idea. Now it is dead."

"In 1989, Rajiv Gandhi lost the election because he was seen as corrupt by ordinary, rural Indians who made up ditties about the ‘son-in-law of Italy’. The Congress party has never explained why the best friends of Rajiv and his wife, Mr and Mrs Quattrocchi, were bribed in this deal. Nor has there been a credible explanation for why Rajiv did not make public the names of those bribed in this deal, even after Bofors officials came to Delhi and offered to give them.... whoever advised the Congress president (Rahul Gandhi) to continue charging Modi with corruption should have reminded him that the ghost of Bofors still lurks in the shadows of 10 Janpath."

"If this was indeed the plan it unraveled early that morning when a Belgian Indologist and Hindutva sympathizer called Koenraad Elst had to be sent home in disgrace because of his remark on Islam. It was not what he said about Islam that was wrong so much as the offensive manner in which he said it... A Muslim diplomat stood up halfway through Elst's speech and walked out. Ram Madhav, who was seated in the front row, intervened and the session was abruptly ended.... The next thing we knew was that Elst had been put back on a flight back to Belgium. The conference was intended to create a new idea of India but definitely not one in which there would be no room for Muslims."

"Many things have changed in India since Narendra Modi first became prime minister. But one change that has gone almost unnoticed is that a process of real decolonisation has transpired. And because of this the old, colonised ruling class has been swept away. This is a very good thing. It should have happened long, long ago. As someone who belonged to that ruling class, I consider myself well qualified to explain why this process of decolonisation was overdue and how we failed India as its ruling class."

"I think it is, without exaggeration, probably the most dangerous piece of that we've had because it amounts to truly destroying the very character of the Indian state and the constitution. [...] Central to the idea was that your would be irrelevant to your belonging, and it's that which is being turned on its head. It's extremely worrying."

"Only Muslims are Indians by choice and people of all the other religions are Indians by chance. After partition, Muslims had the option to go to Pakistan which was created on the basis of their interest and based on the priniciples of their religion... Pakistan was created for Muslims and complying by the principles of their religion. So the Muslims had the opportunity to go to Pakistan, but they proved their patriotism and love for the country by not choosing Pakistan over India. People of other religion, especially the Hindus, had nowhere to go they had to stay back in India. So only Muslims in this country are Indians by choice, apart from them we are all Indians by chance"

"From now on, the decision will not come from the Supreme Court or Parliament. We saw what the Supreme Court did in Ayodhya, NRC and Kashmir matters... The SC has failed to honour secularism, equality and humanity. We will try fighting there too, but, the decision will not happen in the Supreme court nor Parliament, it has to be made in the streets"

"[T]he Hindutva project requires a radical, violent rupture between India’s Hindus and those of the hated “other” that it constructs, India’s Muslims and Christians."

"However, [Harsh Mander] said there was an “institutional bias” against the minorities which needed to be corrected. “In cases of communal violence, the entire criminal justice system has been against the minorities. It is to correct this institutional bias that we need a special law. There have been riots against the Hindus, but have you ever heard of a provincial armed constabulary firing against them?”."

"People who have links with ISIS are instigating riots in the national capital. An American national named George Soros has promised to defeat Indian nationalism by pledging $1 billion and his organisation. Harsh Mander is a board member of the controversial organisation, who was also the member of UPA-era extra-constitutional body National Advisory Council."

"These days, much-acclaimed characters like John Dayal, Harsh Mander and Arundhati Roy lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account."

"Harsh Mander has already been condemned by the Press Council of India for spreading false rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities in his famous column Hindustan Hamara."

"No Indian government will allow Amnesty International ...to set foot inside this country... Amnesty International ...will ask neither the Indian government for the truth, facts and figures...[but] will ask the likes of Teesta Setalvad, Harsh Mander and Kathy Sreedhar..."

"“I find nothing wrong in being called a ‘Hindu’ writer, but I dislike the implicit assumption in that terminology.”"

"Remember, in the Indian way, only the shruti scriptures are of divine origin. The laws, or smriti books, are not of divine origin, but man-made, which means we can change the laws depending on what society wants. There are many smritis besides the Manu Smriti, some are very liberal and some are conservative, and they reflect the mood of the society when these smritis were written."

"Our society has collectively chosen a smriti for now: it’s called the Indian Constitution."

"I wish I could explain, in a manner others may consider “rational”, how these plots come to me. But I can’t. I just open the laptop, and there is this parallel universe that opens up and I record what I see. I discover the story while writing just as much as readers discover the story while reading. So I know it may sound strange but I genuinely believe that these stories are the blessings of Lord Shiva. I am only a channel. I am only someone who is lucky enough to receive this blessing."

"“this is a bravado that comes out of a sinking ship,”"

"“The consistency in the approach of mainstream media suggests there is coordination going on. Each person is not doing an investigation.”"

"[The head of Oxus Investments finds Times Now given the most to hyperventilation followed by NDTV and India Today.] “They are immensely biased; they need to be exposed.”"

"“I have said to these English channels that if there is an issue of national import, and not a local/Delhi issue, I don’t want to be there with an AAP guy. These channels — Times Now, NDTV and India Today — try to push these guys. What locus standi do they have? I just don’t understand. Basically it is to build up (a controversy to malign the government). This is something unusual. It cannot be that they can’t find anybody else. What I strongly feel and object to is that the news is much more biased than it has ever been. I have a lot of evidence to support that.”"

"India is in a unique situation because of the attendant poverty factor. Primarily thanks to the lockdown, announced by prime minister Narendra Modi in good time, the COVID death toll at a little over 3400 compares well with the figures in the West, which is tens of thousands. But, ironically, it is the lockdown that has put at risk the lives of millions of daily wage workers and their families as they reverse-migrate from the big cities where they work. There are no exact figures available for those who have died of starvation and exhaustion. Nearly a hundred have been killed in road and rail accidents alone. Thousands are still on the road. Social media is awash with tears and angst of the middle class flagellating themselves over the tragedy — though it is hard to imagine them skipping a meal in contrition. But the point they make is well taken. The virus has served, as never before, to underline the shocking poverty of the country."

"There is any number of images of men pulling makeshift carts with their wife and kids squatting in it, across hundreds of kilometres; of children trekking vast distances and falling dead; of women lugging trolley bags with their kids asleep on top. The Modi government pressed trains and buses in their service. And thousands have travelled home by these means. But many have hit the road before the services were made available. Many, too, have no means to arrive at stations from where they stay, and so decided to walk. It is 40C in the shade here and climbing. Drinking water is hard to come by out on the road. And the open sandals that most wears do not help in long treks."

"On May 12, Modi addressed the nation, announcing a Rs20 lakh crore package to stimulate the economy. Ever confident, he said COVID was a challenge and an opportunity. He promised a new India. One could have wept out of hope and despair. [...] The fact is that Modi’s speech was little more than a regurgitation of his stock vision — which coincides with the Indian middle class’s (left or right) dream of a modern India, good roads, good jobs, good patriots; An America with booming Vedic Chants. [...] Not much of it is likely to trickle down to the long-marchers. Clearly, the thing to do is to build rural India, so that if the workers want to migrate to the cities, it will be out of choice. For the present, if the ragged millions in their despair continue to flee the urban India of Modi’s dream and trek the melting roads in broken sandals, one must conclude that little has changed since Mahatma Gandhi led the country to freedom in 1947."

"And we could poke fun at them about by-passing the toll gates and 10 shilling notes and driving up on Ferguson tractors and supplying them with maps of Dublin and Nelson's Pillar not being there anymore."

"If they waited a couple of hours they could have commemorated two massacres in Croke Park."

"They always feel a bit isolated up there in the north-west."

"This union, which is dominated by some socialist philosophy, is not fit for purpose."

"I often got a belt from my mother with a wet dish cloth for kicking a ball through a window."

"The Miraculous Medal around his neck is obviously not working all the time anyway."

"I see the Taoiseach keeping a very close eye on the Donegal team, obviously looking for prospective candidates for Donegal in the next election."

"They're like the grim reaper when anybody comes [to Croke Park] they just put them away with ruthless efficiency."

"There is no hope for anybody else. You might as well give up the ghost now."

"Did you see last week where he referred to 'the Greek poet Horace', assisting those of us who are too old by translating the Latin quotation into English? ... Horace a Roman citizen, wrote in Latin. Homer was the Greek poet. Good luck to Meath at the weekend."

"I think Colm might need to go to Specsavers, because any big game I've seen, Michael does not go hiding, that's for sure. He has been brilliant, he is a leader on and off the pitch and he goes looking for work anywhere on that pitch."

"Do we realise how that hastily-ordered ban [on the book The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie] has changed India forever? .... When the Government promptly submitted to this illiterate hysteria, it convinced [Hindus] that secularism had become a code phrase for Muslim appeasement."

"There is something profoundly worrying in the response of what might be called the secular establishment to the massacre in Godhra. ... There is no suggestion that the karsewaks started the violence ... there has been no real provocation at all ... And yet, the sub-text to all secular commentary is the same: the karsewaks had it coming to them. Basically, they condemn the crime; but blame the victims ..."

"Try and take the incident out of the secular construct that we, in India, have perfected and see how bizarre such an attitude sounds in other contexts. Did we say that New York had it coming when the Twin Towers were attacked last year? Then too, there was enormous resentment among fundamentalist Muslims about America's policies, but we didn't even consider whether this resentment was justified or not. Instead we took the line that all sensible people must take: any massacre is bad and deserves to be condemned. When Graham Staines and his children were burnt alive, did we say that Christian missionaries had made themselves unpopular by engaging in conversion and so, they had it coming? No, of course, we didn't."

"Why then are these poor karsewaks an exception? Why have we de- humanised them to the extent that we don't even see the incident as the human tragedy that it undoubtedly was ... I know the arguments well because—like most journalists—I have used them myself. And I still argue that they are often valid and necessary. But there comes a time when this kind of rigidly ‘secularist’ construct not only goes too far; it also becomes counter-productive. When everybody can see that a trainload of Hindus was massacred by a Muslim mob, you gain nothing by blaming the murders on the VHP 19 or arguing that the dead men and women had it coming to them. Not only does this insult the dead (What about the children? Did they also have it coming?), but it also insults the intelligence of the reader."

"There is one question we need to ask ourselves: have we become such prisoners of our own rhetoric that even a horrific massacre becomes nothing more than occasion for Sangh Parivar-bashing?"

"The answer, I suspect, is that we are programmed to see Hindu-Muslim relations in simplistic terms: Hindus provoke, Muslims suffer."

"When this formula does not work -- it is clear now that a well-armed Muslim mob murdered unarmed Hindus - we simply do not know how to cope. We shy away from the truth - that some Muslims committed an act that is indefensible - and resort to blaming the victims."

"Any media - indeed, any secular establishment - that fails to take into account the genuine concerns of people risks losing its own credibility."

"Even moderate Hindus, of the sort that loathe the VHP, are appalled by the stories that are now coming out of Gujarat: stories with uncomfortable reminders of 1947 with details about how the bogies were first locked from outside and then set on fire and how the women’s compartment suffered the most damage."

"There is something profoundly worrying in the response of what might be called the secular establishment to the massacre in Godhra...Some versions have it that the karsevaks shouted anti-Muslim slogans; others that they taunted and harassed Muslim passengers. According to these versions, the Muslim passengers got off at Godhra and appealed to members of their community for help. Others say that the slogans were enough to enrage the local Muslims and that the attack was revenge...it does seem extraordinary that slogans shouted from a moving train, or at a railway platform, should have been enough to enrage local Muslims, enough for 2,000 of them to have quickly assembled at eight in the morning, having already managed to procure petrol bombs and acid bombs."

"After the unrelenting persecution by the Mamata Banerjee government and threats ... I have decided to move to Delhi. Staying in West Bengal under the current regime it is next to impossible to report the truth."

"I speak as the Editor of OpIndia when I say that our platform itself believes that majority media houses have lost their ethical code. We have over 300 articles filed under “Media lies”. To ask us then, to conform to the ethical standards set by the very institution we oppose is a monstrosity at myriad levels... The moment you censor thoughts, you kill the soul of a man and the spirit of the writer. I oppose any regulation that may just as easily morph into tools of censorship."

"An example of why semantics matter: Delhi Riots were decisively planned and executed by Islamists against Hindus. But guess how the Left defined it? They called it an “anti Muslim POGROM”. Not genocide. Not riot. A “POGROM”. A “POGROM” has a very distinct feature internationally. It essentially connects to genocide particularly of Jews. Left wanted to equate Islamists to Jews in order to internationalise the issue (works as they can compare Hindus to Nazis). They lied. But the lie was well thought The first step is to define our problems better. It is time that we start playing the game slightly more intelligently. Slightly more mindfully. Our civilisation is at stake. They use clever words to sell a lie. Let’s try and do the same to explain our truth, at least"

"While the Left dismisses these occurrences as a figment of the ‘right-wing imagination’, the cases are real. The dead bodies are also real and the threat is imminent... It is because of the narrow definition of a term like ‘Love Jihad’ that the Left is now attempting to twist it to allege that the term Love Jihad is simply used because ‘extremist Hindus’ are against inter-faith marriages, whereas, the phenomenon is far from being about consensual relationships. It is for these reasons that OpIndia has now decided to do away with the term ‘Love Jihad’ in its parlance and reportage. There is no ‘Love’ in Jihad and even if accept the term along with its problematic syntax, it fails to capture the severity of the Jihad that is being waged by sections of radical Muslims that specifically target non-Muslim women. We believe that the term ‘Grooming Jihad’ is far more appropriate since it encapsulates within itself all categories of crimes that keep women at the centre of this Jihad. Non-Muslim women are being groomed to accept their own subjugation at the hands of Muslim men. They are kidnapped, raped, lured, converted to Islam, punished and brainwashed. There is no ‘Love’ in these crimes against humanity. There is no ambiguity that it is a form of Jihad. It is time to call it what it is – Grooming Jihad."

"I spoke to a young girl today, who was gang raped by TMC workers. She says she was targeted because she was a Hindu woman and because she worked for BJP. She is still being hounded and threatened to take her complaint back... After a 1.5 hour conversation with her, I was left numb and nauseous. There are several like her who aren’t speaking up. Brutalised by TMC workers. She is a brave girl because she says she won’t take her complaint back even if it means death for her..."

"There are some events in the history of a people that get etched in the memory like no other. The Delhi Riots and the cycle of fake news, blatant lies, misrepresentations, fear-mongering and carnage that was unleashed against Hindus is one such. CAA was the fulfilling of a foundational promise of the Republic of India. Providing refuge to the persecuted minorities in the Islamic countries of our immediate neighbourhood was a sacred oath that was sworn by the first leaders of our Republic in the immediate years of the partition of our country. It took us decades to fulfill that promise but better late than never. Under normal circumstances, it should have been a cause for celebration, a moment of euphoria for the nation as a whole but the times we live in, while the tears of joy in the faces of the refugees was still evident, the nation could not unite to share in their moment of bliss as Radical Islam reared its ugly head. Even so, it was truly a historic moment and the relevance of it could never be exaggerated. Since December, the entire ecosystem that comprises of Islamists, the Left, India’s traditional cabal of intelligentsia and media not only vilified Hindus, but also shielded the ones who were unleashing violence against the unsuspecting victims. The cycle of carnage started when the government of India decided to ease the process of getting citizenship of India for the persecuted religious minorities of naighbouring Islamic nations."

"Further, we would also like to thank the avowed Hinduphobes. It is you who said ‘Hum Dekhenge’. It is you who said ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega’, and it is because of that we realized the need to remember everything – every little slogan, every little speech that incited hate against Hindus, every stone pelted, every life claimed and every incident of violence against Hindus."

"The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) is aimed to expedite citizenship to the religiously persecuted minorities of the neighboring Islamic nations that were carved out of India and failed to treat its citizens equally."

"Harsh Mander has served in the National Advisory Council (NAC), an advisory body set up by the first United Progressive Alliance government to advise the Prime Minister of India, with Sonia Gandhi as its chairperson. The body was widely regarded by Indian citizens and then opposition political parties as unconstitutional. The body comprised people from civil society organizations of questionable repute. The NAC faced the harshest criticism for its draft of the Communal Violence Bill. The Bill, officially referred to as the Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011, promulgated that Hindus ought to be considered the presumptive guilty party in the case of any communal riots. It assumed that only religious or linguistic minorities and people from the Scheduled Castes and Tribes could be the victims of communal violence conveniently ignoring all ground realities."

"Harsh Mander with his organization ‘Karwaan-e-Mohabbat’ published a report on the police action at the Aligarh Muslim University that absolved the students of all sins and peddled numerous lies against the Uttar Pradesh Police. Later, of course, the entire report turned out to be a massive fraud."

"Most intriguingly, Harsh Mander is the Chairman of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation’s Human Rights Initiative Advisory Board. The controversial left-wing ‘activist’ Harsh has landed himself in a spot of bother after a video where he can be seen inciting Muslim mobs against the Indian State and judiciary went viral on social media. Mander said that henceforth, decisions pertaining to matters of the state shall not be decided by the Supreme Court or the Parliament but will be made in the streets. Since then, the Supreme Court has refused to hear Harsh Mander’s petition until he clarifies his ‘justice on the streets’ speech."

"In the past, Harsh Mander has engaged in apologia for Ishrat Jahan, a female Lashkar-e-Taiba operative who was killed in an encounter along with three others by Crime Branch Officials in Gujarat during Narendra Modi’s tenure as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. He was also one of the individuals who had signed a mercy petition for the 1993 Mumbai Attack Terrorist Yakub Memon, was among the 203 persons who had signed the mercy petition for Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Kasab responsible for the Mumbai Terror Attack of 2008, and had signed the mercy petition for Afzal Guru, the mastermind of the 2001 Terror Attack on the Indian Parliament. In 2019, Harsh Mander had filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking the recusal of then Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi from hearing a case relating to the condition of detention camps and deportation of illegal immigrants from Assam. He was also one of the forty ‘activists’ who had filed a review petition in the Court against the Ayodhya Verdict that has paved the way for a Ram Temple at Ayodhya, bringing an end to a historical dispute. He is also part of the coterie that has filed a petition against the Citizenship Amendment Act. Moreover, Harsh Mander is also a member of the Ara Pacis Initiative, an organization backed by the Italian Government and is known to work in collaboration with the Italian Secret Services."

"Sharjeel Imam’s rise to notoriety was driven by a speech he made that went viral on social media. In the said video, he had urged Muslims to cut off North East India from the rest of the country by blocking the Chicken’s Neck. The Chicken’s Neck is a narrow stretch of land of about 22 kilometers located in West Bengal, that connects the northeastern states to the rest of India, with Nepal and Bangladesh lying on either side of the corridor.. The stretch of land is extremely important for Indian national security reasons and considering Sharjeel Imam’s educational qualifications, it is plainly obvious that he was fully aware of the implications of his words. Sharjeel Imam says in the viral video, “If five lakh Muslims are organized then we can cut off the North-east from the rest of India. If we cannot do so permanently, then at least we can do it for months. Our responsibility is to cut Assam from India, only then will the Government hear our voice. If we have to help Assam then we will have to cut Assam from the rest of India.” The worldview of Sharjeel Imam was made obvious from the posts he made on Facebook and the column he penned for far-left media outlet The Wire, which is known to spread fake news."

"He has claimed that the hanging of Radical Islamic Terrorists Yakub Memon and Afzal Guru would ‘shake’ the faith of Indian Muslims in the country’s judiciary and democratic values. He also attempted to whitewash the Pulwama Terror Attack carried out by Radical Islamic Terrorists in 2019 and claimed that the USA is responsible for the tensions between India and Pakistan, ignoring the fact that Pakistan has been guilty of sponsoring terrorist attacks on Indian soil. Sharjeel Imam has also accused India, USA and Israel of Islamophobia."

"Sharjeel Imam is important in the scheme of things because it was him who masterminded the anti-CAA Shaheen Bagh protests and making the state machinery to capitulate to mob rule by blocking off streets was his brainchild as well. And as we know, it was precisely that led to the situation spiraling out of control. In another Facebook post, Sharjeel denigrates Idol-Worship and calls it ‘Shirk’. He also insults polytheism, the form of religiosity most Hindus subscribe to, by using it as an insult. He equates atheism, secularism, humanism, even nationalism, to Shirk. In Islamic theology, ‘Shirk’ is considered a sin."

"Sharjeel Imam’s plan for the future becomes evident during this part of the speech which is towards the end of it. He lays out an elaborate plan to make the state bow down to the Muslim community. He makes it clear that it is not a fight between the Congress party or the BJP but one between the Muslim community and the Indian State... He concludes his speech by saying that ‘We have the strength to bring Hindustan to a halt’."

"The radical Islamic outfit, Popular Front of India has been in the midst of several dangerous controversies and plots of radical terrorists... . The PFI is suspected of funding violence in the recent spate of violence during the ongoing protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act. The Enforcement Directorate has claimed that the PFI has spent around Rs. 120 crores to fuel riots across the country. The investigation report says that the money was withdrawn a day before or on the day of the anti-CAA protests."

"The PFI has a history of its members being associated with violence. Only in November 2019, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) had re-arrested the out-on-bail accused and a member of PFI, KA Najeeb, in connection with a professor’s palm chopping case in Kerala. Najeeb was booked under relevant sections of the IPC, Explosive Substances Act, and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for “conspiring and facilitating the lethal attack on Professor TJ Joseph at Thodupuzha, Ernakulam district in Kerala on July 4, 2010.” PFI member Asim Sharif is also suspected of involvement in the killing of RSS activist Rudresh. Rudresh, the RSS worker, was hacked to death in the Shivajinagar area of Bengaluru in October 2016. Five men including Asim Sharif were arrested in the case and a National Investigation Agency court had framed charges against them. Asim Sharif was reportedly the district president of Bengaluru PFI..."

"Prashant Bhushan has been at the forefront of these violent protests, part of the coterie of high-profile activists that he is. There were legal teams working to help protesters avoid the consequences for their actions, some of them were headed by advocate Prashant Bhushan himself. The 'advocate' also spread numerous canards against the CAA and NRC during the run-up to February, calling it an attempt to snatch away citizenship from the "poor, Dalits and Muslims"."

"Prashant Bhushan has also declared that CAA and the NRC was the “first concrete step” to establish a Hindu Rashtra in India. An article [396] he co-authored in January said, “Though agitation in the country has been sparked off by the passing of the communal and discriminatory CAA, a far more serious malaise lies behind the NRIC and the NPR. This exercise has however, finally lit the spark of a massive people’s movement against this inhuman and communal regime. The government is trying to suppress the protests by brutal police action in BJP ruled states.”.. During this period, he also had a run-in with the Judiciary. At a press conference in January [397] , he called Uttar Pradesh Police the “largest organised gang of communal criminals in the country.” At the same press conference, he said, “Ironically, the High Court and Supreme Court kept mum over the anarchy in the state. Such a situation was not even seen during the Emergency period.""

"Prashant Bhushan, who has been a vocal critic of the Modi Government, is associated with the foreign-funded NGO CommonCause. CommonCause has a history of making legal interventions, often pertaining to very critical matters of the state. Leaving aside matters of law, it is indeed a cause for grave concern for the Indian State that foreign funded organizations are intervening in crucial matters of the state. They could very well be pushing forward foreign interests to undermine India’s own."

"Amnesty International has been extremely vocal in its opposition towards the CAA and the NRC."

"Thus, quite clearly, Amnesty was engaging in crass fear-mongering and demonizing the law and order establishment as they attempted to rein in the chaos that had unleashed and bring the perpetrators to justice. Thus, it is important for us to understand the possible factors that might have prompted Amnesty India to engage in such propaganda and for that, it is necessary to look into their background... The rank and file of Amnesty India appears to be overflowing with people with mala fide intentions."

"Retired Justice Madan B Lokur, who recently spoke out against the CAA has links to an NGO as well. ...Justice Lokur’s association with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) may provide some clue into the reasons behind his flip flop on the matter of detention centers and his comments on the CAA. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the CHRI... As per its website, “CHRI’s work is split into two core themes: Access to Information and Access to Justice, which includes Prison Reform, Police Reform, and advocacy on media rights and the South Asia Media Defenders Network (SAMDEN). ...The ideological inclinations of Salil Tripathi, Siddharth Varadarajan of The Wire, and the New York Times are well known. These are compulsive contrarians who have a problem with anything and everything that the Modi government does. There are more troubling aspects to the CHRI than meets the eye. For instance, the CHRI had received Rs. 2,29,500 on the 20th of September, 2019 from the United States’ Department of State for the purpose of “Advocacy and Outreach Programme for Detainees in the North Eastern States of India”. The CHRI has also received huge amounts of money from the Oak Foundation, a shady globalist organization. ...The Oak Foundation is particularly shady... The CHRI also receives crores of funds from dubious sources that appear hell-bent on undermining the sovereignty of India."

"AltNews was not the only digital media outlet that came to the defense of Tahir Hussain. The Wire provided its platform to the AAP leader to declare his innocence and engage in further victim-mongering. In a video clip shared by The Wire on social media, Tahir Hussain can be heard saying that he should not be targeted for his Muslim identity. Engaging in such problematic rhetoric when several serious allegations have been leveled against Tahir Hussain by eyewitnesses and the family of a deceased Intelligence Bureau constable is irresponsible behaviour on the part of a media outlet, to put it mildly. However, it’s consistent with how the media has conducted itself in the entire matter."

"Jai Shri Ram’ is a widely popular slogan among Hindus that literally means ‘Glory to Shri Rama’. Lord Ram is a Hindu God who is loved and cherished by Hindus across the world. However, in recent times, attempts have been made to restrict the slogan to only those groups that endorse ‘Hindutva’, that is, the ideological stance of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Thus, the WSJ’s report that claimed that Ankur Sharma had told them that his deceased brother was attacked by a mob chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ was naturally interpreted by people across the political spectrum that the murder was committed by a Hindu mob."

"The only problem with WSJ’s report is that Ankur Sharma has never said such a thing. Every time that they have spoken to the media, Ankit Sharma’s family has always maintained that Tahir Hussain is responsible for his death. Even the FIR filed by the Police on the basis of the statement given by the family holds the AAP leader as the accused party. It was quite clearly a malicious lie that was peddled by the WSJ. Speaking to OpIndia Editor Nupur J Sharma, Ankur Shamra flatly refuted the quote that was attributed to him by the WSJ. “I have never said this madam, the people who murdered my brother were not shouting Jai Shree Ram”, he said. [467] Elsewhere, he has also accused the WSJ of lying. Quite clearly, it was either a monumental mistake on the part of the WSJ or it was a malicious lie that was generated solely to cast aspersions on the ruling party at the Center. Given how the media has behaved during the entire saga, one is forced to assume that it’s the latter."

"The Indian Media has indulged in propaganda regarding the violence in Delhi as well. First, they often spread misinformation about the provisions of the CAA itself. Then, they ran an atrocious defense for Tahir Hussain. And furthermore, they also tried to propagandize into existence a “students’ movement” against the CAA, a phenomenon that did not exist on the ground."

"The conduct of the Western Media was even more atrocious. The Wall Street Journal fabricated quotes in order to blame Hindu groups for the murder of Ankit Sharma. They have tried to paint the communal riots as an ‘anti-Muslim pogrom’. In their hatred for Donald Trump, they targeted the Prime Minister so that the US President could be criticized for refusing to interfere with the internal matters of India."

"In the last few days, you would have noticed that we were the target of a coordinated attack from the usual suspects as well as from some unusual corners... I am not saying that they can’t make mistakes, and when our well-wishers like you would point them out, they will make amends. But this time, their only mistake was that they were standing on the wrong side of the ideological divide. But that stand is non-negotiable. That’s what is the soul, the identity of India. That’s not going to change."

"We have worked with relentless focus to show how a certain section of the mainstream media distorts facts and maligns those who dare to question them. OpIndia too was mocked and maligned – and that process has not stopped, nor it will stop ever, we are sure – we were treated as outcasts, branded ‘trolls’ (we don’t complain), personal lives of people associated with the website were targeted, but we persisted. While we made these powerful enemies, what kept us going was the fact that we made many friends too. We could create a community that stood by us and continues to support us to this day."

"If I disapproved of the ban on The Satanic Verses, if I disapproved of Dinanath Batra (whom I called “Ban Man” in my article in The Washington Post), if I disapproved of how Taslima Nasreen was hounded and attacked in Hyderabad by Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM, then I can’t suddenly do a volte face and chest-thump today. When you ban a book, it acquires a kind of cult status because the market fuels curiosity. That is what happened with other banned books. In fact, there are books chronicling banned books by different regimes in history...All I am saying is that forcing Bloomsbury India to withdraw the book is counter-productive – both politically and in the pure sense of how market forces work... Where do you draw the line? Today, many are relieved that this book will not find a publisher in Bloomsbury. But what will you do if Swarajya or OpIndia launches a publishing house of its own in the future?"

"The Delhi riot were completely falsified as an anti-muslim progrom, it was not. Your research has shown that, i think you have done some terrific work... We must speak truth on it, and if we have Freedom of Expression in this country,... This is a complete attack on the Freedom of Expression. So we must bring this book on the shelves and if Bloomsbury does not bring this book back on the shelves then Bloomsbury should leave India. .. The next cabal we have to break is the cabal of these publishers."

"The book by Rana Ayyub is of no utility. It is based upon surmises, conjectures and suppositions and has no evidentiary value. The opinion of a person is not in the realm of the evidence. There is a likelihood of the same being politically motivated, cannot be ruled out. The way in which the things have moved in Gujarat post-Godhra incident, such allegations and counter-allegations are not uncommon and had been raised a number of times and have been found to be untenable and afterthought."

"It is a different matter that the petition was dismissed by the Court. The apex court had even remarked, “In our opinion on merits in view of the material that has been placed on record including that of Azam Khan’s statement and book by Rana Ayyub, no case is made out on the basis of material placed on record so as to direct further investigation or re-investigation. There is absolutely no material for that purpose.” It had also stated, “The Book by Rana Ayyub is of no utility. It is based upon surmises, conjectures, and suppositions and has no evidentiary value.”"

"Just because you’re doing something for someone else doesn’t mean it’s impersonal. We do things for others every day that have completely personal reasons. I mean, this isn’t some selfless, saintly movie! Obviously there is ego and hubris involved, things you’re doing because you think they’ll look cool. Often, those are the things that don’t really turn out right"

"As the great-grandson of a Party commissar, I resent Stalin avatar tankies for appropriating my culture without even doing the research (becoming an alcoholic, dying before the age of 50)"

"A good rule of thumb is that if a society requires a vast secret police network, multi-million death tolls, and expendable prison labor to operate, it definitely doesn't work."

"Very disappointing that Sligo have pulled out of the championship... Longford and Leitrim have had issues... the integrity of the competition is being questioned now. Why is it all weaker counties that seem to be in bother with this, does it suit them?"

"Tomás Ó Sé is a pundit, he is not appointed or elected by anybody to question anybody... He is just promoting his own agenda, to promote himself as a pundit. That's what all this is about. What Tomás Ó Sé is at is unforgivable and I think he should consider his position as a pundit when he is prepared to condemn lesser people and ask 'does it suit us'."

"Brian was on the phone constantly, even ringing the hotel to make sure I was doing a spot of training."

"Rarely is anyone thanked for the work they did to prevent the disaster that didn't happen."

"We are no longer securing computers - we are securing the society."

"Cyber weapons are effective, affordable and deniable. That’s a great combination in any weapon."

"If it's smart, it's vulnerable."

"It is not a question of privacy against security. It's a question of freedom against control."

"Adobe Reader is the worst piece of software I’ve seen, right after QuickTime."

"The proliferation of internet-connected smart devices will be the IT asbestos of the future."

"Privacy is dead, and it was killed by the internet. This is what our generation will be remembered for."

"Security is like Tetris: Your successes disappear but your failures pile up."

"So why should people respect and obey the law? There are, of course, many answers, but the answer I gave myself is this: we can ask people to obey the law if it is the best approximation to justice. Which implies that we are duty bound to listen to criticisms of the law, and make sincere efforts to make the law better, and correct mistakes as much as possible. Justice is the soul of the law without which the rule of law descends to the level of rule by force, even if it is force by majority."

"I understand Sir Thomas More is the patron saint of the legal profession [...]. His famous last words were well authenticated. I beg to slightly adapt and adopt them: I stand the law's good servant but the people's first. For the law must serve the people, not the people the law."

"Marxism is not inherently adaptive, instead relying on historical determinism to analyze social development and chart a political path."

"For the Chinese Communist Party, history is legitimacy."

"Xi Jinping has many goals, such as battling corruption, fostering innovation, and projecting power abroad through his Belt and Road Initiative, but controlling history underlies them all."

"To call your child Mohammed is to colonize France."

"I am aware of the enthusiasm that my potential Presidential candidacy can evoke. That enthusiasm exists because the French people do not want to die. It is there because there is hope."

"I still can't go of course. But if I didn't go, I would disappoint a lot of people. One would consider it desertion. As betrayal. And that also counts in my decision-making. I will choose the moment myself. And it will be there soon."

"The question of who is allowed to stay on French soil is a political issue par excellence that should not be left to "an oligarchy of national and European judges. The French should be able to decide that for themselves.""

"A French first name shows that you really want to belong. The family name refers to the civilization of the country of origin that is left behind. The French first name refers to the future."

"For my ancestors, the arrival of the French was an enormous progress. The door to culture, freedom and emancipation opened, they were no longer second-class citizens."

"Demography determines our destiny."

"The brightest representatives of the Islamic diaspora have long figured out how to use this liberalism to blow up the remnants of the nation-state, free themselves from the weak authority of the republic, and establish the law of Allah in their own enclaves."

"What else should we call the beheading of Samuel Paty a year ago or, say, the policewoman who had her throat slit in her own office? The sixteenth-century wars of religion also started little by little. It took fifty years for the struggle between Protestants and Catholics to erupt on Bartholomew's Night in 1572."

"Islam is a civilisation incompatible with the principles of France."

"Thierry Baudet I met him once. A very likeable man. He wants the Netherlands to remain the Netherlands. Just as France has to remains France."

"The first problem is France's destination and demographics. The invasion of migration. We have a big problem and we absolutely have to solve it, otherwise France in 20 years will no longer be France, but an area like Lebanon with communities fighting each other."

"Eric Zemmour is a man from the right who has never belonged to the extreme right, or to Mrs. and Mr. Le Pen's party. But he is someone who has the ideas of Geert Wilders about Islam and migration. We have the paradox that Marine Le Pen, who has been called the far right for the past 20 years, is being overtaken by someone who is much harsher and more pessimistic."

"Trump has forged a coalition between the workers and the patriotic elite. I strongly believe in the coalition that has brought Trump together. Just like Boris Johnson. That, I think, is the political axis of the future."

"I want France to be in Europe, but I want France to come before Europe... With me the European flag will never fly without the French Tricolor."

"Our commitment is that France will never come to resemble the abandoned Calais of today."

"Whether you share Eric Zemmour's beliefs or not, by sponsoring his candidacy you are contributing to the return of pluralism."

"Eric Zemmour became a television celebrity for his ability to debate. He is a polemicist who's renowned for his extensive culture and his very good ability to defend and communicate his ideas. And he first had the reputation of someone who has a passion for oratorical jousting."

"Eric Zemmour is a writer, a journalist who, for twenty years, has been alerting the public opinion and our leaders to the fact that our country cannot cope with a completely deregulated immigration like the one we have known for decades; that security is the first of freedoms; that figures for petty crimes, attacks on property and people are skyrocketing and that soon, in France, we will have a serious problem with that."

"I would add that Eric Zemmour is rather largely what one calls a declinist, that is to say, the idea that France was better off before and that the power of France, the support and respect that France inspires abroad, its influence in international relations have only declined. And that without a surge of national spirit, France is poised to disappear."

"Very clearly, he is someone who is very much to the right of the political spectrum, both on the socio-economic axis and on the cultural axis."

"I think Les Républicains should give their support to Eric Zemmour in a very formal way, because Les Républicains voters have long been waiting for someone like him on immigration, justice and security issues."

"Zemmour, as an individual, has never campaigned on the far right. He was never a member of the National Front. He calls himself a Gaullist."

"The only difference between Eric and myself is that he is Jewish."

"Eric Zemmour is not a politician. Eric Zemmour is someone who talks about the country, its difficulties and its future. And he is very successful, precisely because he speaks about the reality of our country without using the doublespeak of our politicians."

"The real question is whether [Zemmour's rise in the poll] is a media bubble which is linked to his overexposure in the media -- an overexposure which is likely to continue -- or if it is a real, deeper phenomenon which sees Marine Le Pen losing voters due to a fatigue after her party repeatedly failed to conquer power"

"The oratorical talent of Eric Zemmour, whom everyone recognises, could appear to some voters as something that Marine Le Pen does not know how to do, or no longer knows how to do."

"Marine Le Pen continues to have the support of working-class categories, especially precarious, young working poor voters, whereas Eric Zemmour, for the moment, is rather a candidate supported by men with rather bourgeois socio-economic positions, certain fringes of business circles, craftsmen, shop owners and older voters"

"The choice for all those people in trouble, including the Yellow Vests, is between not voting or a protest vote. You should not underestimate the non-voters, that was very strong. And that opens up for Éric Zemmour the possibility that people who don't believe in voting anymore say: finally a candidate outside the system and anti-system, so let's try it."

"Much of France has been abandoned. That screamed his anger in 2018 and now feels recognized by Éric Zemmour."

"Some laws come directly from God. There is a thunderbolt, the smoke clears, and there they are, the Commandments on a stone tablet. Most laws, however, do not have their origin in God but in man, which is the case with the law that will soon ban bestiality in the State of Washington."

"The state wanted to punish this man for horse fucking but because there was no law against it at the time the horse fucking occurred, the state could only charge him with a crime as boring as drunken driving, serving booze to minors, a failed attempt to turn a trick."

"There are two possible reasons for this surprising omission from Washington State's legal code: Either the State of Washington overlooked bestiality (which is not a bad thing to overlook considering there are much bigger problems to worry about—wars, poverty, earthquakes, health care... These issues are pressing; horse fucking is not), or, the reason for the law's absence—the one I believe is much more likely—is that no one wanted to contemplate horse fucking, much less talk about it. The formation of any law requires a lot of thought and even more talking. To pass a measure against bestiality means you have to picture it, write about it, and describe it in great detail."

"[…] [R]eading the law that was drafted by Senator Roach is very much like reading hardcore porn. Here is the last paragraph of the bill: "'Sexual contact' means any contact, however slight, between the sex organ or anus of a person and the sex organ, mouth, or anus of any animal, or any intrusion, however slight, of any part of the body of the person into the sex organ or anus of an animal, for the purpose of sexual gratification or arousal of the person. Evidence of emission of semen is not required to prove sexual contact.""

"Once the law changed, and bestiality was made illegal in Washington, everyone sort of said, "It's over and it will never happen again. And if it does happen again, we'll know what to do." No one has been arrested for bestiality in Washington since, to my knowledge."

"Everyone in Enumclaw is very close to horses. It's a quiet, rural suburb with a view of the mountains. Everyone is a horse person, and as you know, the town included all types of horse worship. It was a place where you could fuck horses, and no one could tell."

"If [Kenneth] Pinyan didn't die, those guys he hung out with would still be fucking horses today and no one would have suspected anything. It was a paradise for a horse fucker. I'm sure they were so angry because they must have thought, We had it so good!"

"It disrupted them— [Kenneth Pinyan’s zoophile friends] lost a lot by his death. If you have a moral problem with horse fucking, you might not find this to be a cool way to look at things, but I think the truth is that they lost a lot: stability, a weekend vacation getaway place, something to look forward to. They lost a community."

"[Kenneth Pinyan and his fellow zoophiles] had preferences! They would figure out which horse was too strong, which had the biggest cock, which was the quickest fuck. It was like going to a horse auction."

"Dan Savage and I would talk about if it was a fetish for animals, or a fetish for massive cocks. […] To me, it's clearer today that these guys had this worship of cock that may have had nothing to do with horses. […] The horse that killed Mr. Hands was nicknamed "Big Dick," right? It wasn't called "Nice Horse," or "Beautiful.""

"There's already enough trouble about people deciding if we should keep doing tests on chimps, but to talk about if we should be allowed to fuck them, too?"

"In the fascist Hindutva imagination, the Indian Muslims are continuously reviled as Pakistani "fifth columnists," as "enemies of the nation" and so on, and their patriotism is said to be suspect. The Muslim as the menacing "other" occupies a central place in Hindutva discourse, and this has been used to legitimize large-scale anti-Muslim violence."

"All that energy and enthusiasm that went into my contribution as a 'social activist' and in the cause of the 'Revolution' paid me well in material terms, however, though I have to say that this wasn't the only or even major reason why I was in the business of championing the 'Revolution' in the first place. I won generous scholarships to go abroad to do a Ph.D. and then two post-doctoral projects to study various aspects of 'marginalised groups' in India. I was invited to attend conferences in over two dozen countries to pontificate on the same subjects. I was appointed as a full professor in an Indian university and was paid handsomely for the articles and books that I continued to churn out, machine-like, all about the 'oppressed'. In addition, I was assigned projects by several NGOs to study the 'oppressed', for which I was well rewarded financially. Although I have to say that I did not quite intend this to begin with, writing and conferencing about the 'oppressed' soon turned into a lucrative source of livelihood for me. I was actually, and quite literally, living off the misery of the 'oppressed', although I did not fully realise it then."

"But all that came with a heavy personal price. The more I identified with the 'Revolution' of the 'oppressed', the more unbearably negative I became as a person."

"There was nothing at all good in Hindu traditions or in America or in Capitalist Modernity, for instance, I convinced myself, for I was hooked onto the 'progressive' and 'radical' rhetoric that 'upper' caste Hindus in general (including most of my own family!) and almost every single American was complicit in perpetuating 'oppression'."

"Negativism, then, was a defining feature of being 'progressive', and that's what I began to revel in. But such negativism was almost entirely one-sided in 'activist' circles, for to be counted as a 'real' 'social activist' it was simply unthinkable that the 'oppressed' could be faulted for almost anything at all. For a 'social activist' to even mention, leave alone condemn, the foibles of the 'oppressed communities'--gender injustice or caste rivalries among Dalits or the obscurantism and misogyny preached in many Muslim madrasas or the terror attacks and killings of innocents by Naxalites and radical Islamists--was tantamount to nothing less than treason. Reports about such matters were generally dismissed as 'malicious ruling-class propaganda' or 'malicious Brahminical brainwashing' or even as an 'understandable reaction of vulnerable minority communities to ruling caste/class/imperialist oppression'. Sometimes, if these were grudgingly admitted to be true, they were sought to be passed over in silence in order to 'respect the sensibilities of the oppressed' or as 'minor contradictions' that ought not to be addressed on the grounds that it would allegedly 'divide' the oppressed, 'sabotage' the struggle against 'oppression' and thereby 'play into the hands of the real opressors'. If you only just pointed out that there were serious faults in the madrasas that needed to be urgently addressed (even for the sake of the Muslim children who studied therein) or that Muslim Personal Law was seriously biased against Muslim women or that many Dalits who had taken advantage of the system of protective discrimination behaved with fellow Dalits almost as shabbily as did their 'upper' caste Hindu 'oppressors', you were sure to be shouted down as a 'government agent' or a 'paid stooge of Hindutva forces', not only by fellow 'progressives' but also by a whole host of voices among the communities whom you had spent years trying to defend and promote. If you even so much as mildly hinted that the conditions of Muslims in India weren't half as bad as sections of the Urdu media wanted people to believe or that the Muslims in this country had much more freedom than in any Muslim-majority state or that untouchability was no longer as rampant as it once was in some parts, you were bound to be accused of betrayal and your motives were rumoured to be entirely suspect. If you acknowledged that probably less Muslims were killed by Hindus in riots in India every year than the number of fellow Muslims slaughtered by their co-religionists in the 'Islamic' Republic of Pakistan or in God-forsaken Afghanistan or that the plight of religious minorities in many Muslim countries, particularly those ruled by theocratic regimes, was much worse than in India or that some Dalit officials were neck-deep in corruption, you were bound to be hollered at for allegedly being a 'traitor' to 'The Cause' of the 'oppressed'. The very same folks who egged you on to write about their problems and to take the Hindutva beast by its horns (for they were either too scared to do it themselves or didn't have the same writing skills or the same access to the English media) would shrilly denounce you as an 'agent' of this or the other 'power' if, in your quest to be honest and balanced, you pointed out even some of the mildest of their faults. It was as if by definition the 'oppressed' were spotless angels who could do no wrong and their 'oppressors' wholly and incorrigibly demonic."

"The very same folks who egged you on to write about their problems and to take the Hindutva beast by its horns (for they were either too scared to do it themselves or didn't have the same writing skills or the same access to the English media) would shrilly denounce you as an 'agent' of this or the other 'power' if, in your quest to be honest and balanced, you pointed out even some of the mildest of their faults. It was as if by definition the 'oppressed' were spotless angels who could do no wrong and their 'oppressors' wholly and incorrigibly demonic."

"I also realised one thing, the reason I wasn’t sleeping was not only because I had chronic insomnia, but I was so busy thinking about not sleeping. The idea of me not sleeping engulfed me. By this time, I had stopped going to church or praying."

"He makes a way where there’s no way. He moves mountains and fills valleys. He makes the blind to see. He loves me unconditionally. His word never returns to Him void."

"Remain humble. Give back. Take care of you. Stay fab, don’t hate; hating takes too much effort."

"I have since learnt that there is a process to success and that process can break or build us depending on our beliefs and inner strength. Our thoughts can make or mar us so be careful what you’re thinking about."

"We have walked on that street called hope but having each other makes it bearable. It requires sacrifice & it takes effort & nurturing. You want a good marriage? Work at it!"

"Some people eventually die at 80 but the Truth is, they have been dead since they were in their 30s”"

"Life is too short to wear tight shoes”… so hey, come on!!"

"Sometimes you just gotta turn your back and walk away…your peace of mind counts the most."

"Life is Not a popularity contest…be your authentic self…"

"Just dance…it’s okay not to be such a hot stepper… everyone misses a beat now and again."

"Be mindful how you treat your staff, because if you treat them shabbily, they would not put their best."

"Anti-ageing should begin with de-clogging the body and the mind from years o f grime instead of covering it up with creams and makeup. Some of the bad choices we make in life can age us faster than calendar years."

"When you save the life of one woman, you save a generation who would otherwise be without a mother."

"Change begins with how we as women see, treat and fight for other women. Change truly begins when we do."

"Appreciating the moments with enthusiasm and a “can do” spirit separates the achievers from the rest."

"Don’t dwell too much on what you haven’t achieved, rather focus on how to achieve it. It’s never too late to start again even after starting again."

"I love what I am doing especially as it is impacting people. Genevieve changed my way of thinking from “what if I fail?” to “what if I succeed?”."

"No woman should be anybody’s fool. But if you say should a woman stoop to conquer, then why not."

"Celebrity couples should stop living their lives on twitter and Instagram; it’s ok in the real world for couples to disagree."

"Personally, I don’t think any woman is ugly. Beauty is as much in character as it is in the physical."

"make no apologies for who you are. adorn your life with roses… fragrances and yes, you can stay fab at any age as long as you don’t outsource your happiness… defy all ageing sterotypes…wear your heels, swirl and strike a pose. work that body!"

"No struggle or journey in life is a piece of cake… but the icing on the cake is when our tests become testimonies."

"Be a leader with a heart… don’t take all the credit for what it took a team to build. encourage your team to have bigger goals and appreciate everyone’s contribution."

"There will be days when you feel, “why me o” but they will come and go and you will be back on your feet.."

"The Indian philosophical tradition, in spite of all its brilliance, could not produce a culture that recognized human rights and the intrinsic worth of the individual. Nor could yogic monism give to Indian society a framework for moral absolutes, a strong sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair. Yogic exercises indeed gave flexibility to our bodies but unfortunately the yogic philosophy gave too much flexibility to our morals – making us [i.e. Indians] one of the most corrupt nations in the world."

"The Bible teaches that the human problem is moral , rather than biological or metaphysical. God created human beings good. (Would you expect anything different from an almighty Creator?) Our first parents [Adam and Eve] chose to disobey God and thereby became sinners. That trait has been transmitted to us all . . . From childhood our tendency is towards evil . . . Our central problem, according to the Bible is that we are sinners. We need a divine Savior who will forgive our sins and transform our hearts – the core of our being."

"But now that the Christian influence has diminished in India, the old tantric cult is coming back openly on the surface. There are around fifty-two known centers in India where tantra is taught and practiced. In its crudest forms, it includes worship of sex organs, sex orgies which include drinking of blood and human semen, black magic, human sacrifice and contact with evil spirits through dead and rotting bodies in cremation grounds, etc."

"Pro-Christian Maoists in Orissa have already warned a number of specific Hindu leaders responsible for anti-Christian violence, that they are next on their hit list. A few hundred ‘Christian-Maoist’ guerillas will change the power-equation in Orissa."

"Secular democracy has failed but there is no forum in India that teaches biblical economic and political thought. The Church should be training its youth to reform and run the institutions of justice that Hindu secularism has corrupted. Christ and Mao have come together in Orissa because people oppressed for thousands of years have decided to stand up against the Hindu socio-economic system."

"Besides launching a Jihad against Animism and Hinduism, the Maoists are also active in supporting evangelists. At times, Maoists escort evangelists into remote villages where police officers are afraid to go. They summon everyone to hear the Gospel. The evangelists may show a film such as the ‘Jesus Film’. Half-way through the film the Maoists would stop the film and give a lecture on Maoism. Then they would resume the film and ask an evangelist to give Alter Call. Following a fellowship meal the evangelists would be escorted back to their base! I have heard at least one credible report that Christians and some Maoists spent two days together fasting and praying. Christian leaders have not reported these stories to their supporters because (a) many of them can’t make sense of what they are hearing, and (b) they are also embarrassed by the fact that their mission is supported by ‘terrorists’."

"Meanwhile, another musketeer of the Christian Mission in India was trying to engage Arun Shourie into another duel. Vishal Mangalwadi with headquarters in Mussoorie, U.P., wrote ten letters to the author of Missionaries in India between 8 August 1994 and 21 September 1995. Arun Shourie glanced at the first letter and consigned it to where it belonged - the waste-paper basket. The others that followed remained unopened and met the same fate. He had better things to do than go through the garbage collected by a professional practitioner of suppressio veri suggestion falsi. Mangalwadi published his letters in the form of a book in early 1996. “I had hoped,” he mourned, “that Mr. Shourie would reply to my letters, so that eventually we could publish our dialogue - perhaps jointly. However, since he chose not to, these letters are now placed before the reader as a monologue.”"

"Vishal Mangalwadi is an Indian American evangelist with a strikingly Eurocentric message of Christianity. He claims that colonialism under the British was very good for India, and has written a book specifically praising one of the nastiest evangelists of the British colonial era, William Carey. His thesis is that India’s suffering has been caused by its heathenism. India is one of the societies which has ‘looked to many local and regional gods’, or have ‘postulated that life’s goal is to achieve oneness with the absolute nothingness that constitutes ultimate reality’, or have somehow got lost in ‘esoteric philosophic and religious mysteries’. On the other hand, ‘the only civilization that has looked largely to the Bible for its inspiration, the West, has been able to conquer human cruelty, hopelessness and degradation’, and this should become the role model for all Indians. He laments that the West has become complacent in its success, forgetting that the Bible was ‘the book that catapulted the West to the forefront of world economics, politics, and culture’... He informs his readers with obvious delight that ‘at least one good American Christian (presumably, unaware of the Christian-Maoist nexus) has asked his Congressman if he should help Christians in Orissa buy guns.’ Blaming India’s ills on ‘Hinduism’s gods that require appeasement’, he mourns that Hindus have corrupted the ‘clean institutions built up by British Christians’..."

"For you to be able to inform others and to educate them, you have to be informed yourself and be educated yourself."

"If northern Nigeria were its own country, it would have the world’s worst maternal mortality rate."

"Advocacy succeeds through two things: consistency and tenacity. You have to be patient and keep working."

"Every time I go to Bangladesh—and I go regularly— I find the country still in the midst of war. The guns of 1971 have stopped long ago but conflicts and tensions have not. The society remains divided from top to bottom. People of Bangladesh can be categorised into two groups: pro-liberation and anti-liberation. The first claims to represent the forces which fought against Pakistan to create an independent country. It mostly favours Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Sheikla Mujib-ur-Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh. The second group supports Prime Minister Khaleda Zia. Her husband, Zia-ur-Rahman, headed free Bangladesh through a coup. ...After 30 years of Independence, who did what during the liberation struggle is getting hazier, but not the prejudices. Some impressions about people—a few may well be true—remain implacable. The worst part is that there is no mood of forgetting and forgiving. The liberation or the anti-liberation label has become such a prized possession that the fakes and failures use it to settle scores politically and, worse, violently. The cleavage, really speaking, is like India's caste system, with its prejudices and biases. Appointments, transfers and even allocations of funds are made on the basis of who was on which side."

"1984的作者预见到了专制的进步，却没有预见到技术的进步。"

"一句话，技术是中性的，但技术的进步会让自在的世界更自在，集权的世界更加集权。"

"Every idea worth its name will get exploited. I am not saying it is good. But it is not something we need to stress on, as long as it doesn't appropriate the language of our struggle."

"Clearly, there has been no dip in the misdemeanor of men in all these years. There is still no difference between the man on the street and the man in the Supreme Court."

"I had returned from my Fulbright year at the University of Chicago, blessed with only the joys and none of the irritations of being pregnant with twins. Landing in Melbourne, I went for a routine ultrasound as a beaming, expectant parent. I came out a grieving patient. The twins were dying in utero, unsuspectedly and unobtrusively, from some rare condition that I had never heard of. Two days later, I was induced into labour to deliver the two little boys whom we would never see grow. Then I went home."

"It can be tricky but I try to put my patients' grief into perspective without being insensitive. It's extraordinary how many of them really appreciate knowing that I, and others, have seen thousands of people who are frightened, sad, philosophical, resigned, angry, brave and puzzled, sometimes all together, just like them. It doesn't diminish their own suffering but helps them peek into the library of human experiences that are catalogued by oncologists. It prompts many patients to say that they are lucky to feel as well as they do despite a life-threatening illness, which is a positive and helpful way of viewing the world. I will never know what kind of a doctor I might have become without the searing experience of being a patient. The twins would have been 10 soon. As I usher the next patient into my room to deliver bad news, I like to think that my loss was not entirely in vain."

"The ASRC [Asylum Seeker Resource Centre] needed a volunteer doctor and I said yes, thinking it would be easy work. In quick succession I saw a little boy with a broken arm, a distressed rape victim, a man with uncontrolled hypertension, and a woman with acute asthma, all of whom had been turned away from hospital. The nurse took the little boy to her doctor friend who would plaster his arm at home, and I rummaged through an old carton of supplies to find some antihypertensives and an inhaler. The rape victim fled, confirming that I was not the therapist she needed. I finished my first shift wistful for the controlled environment of my hospital but conflicted that it, and other hospitals, would deny care to sick patients."

""What kind of a doctor will you be?" "An able one, I hope." "I hope that you become a doctor who will engage with the problems of the world." For an 18-year-old medical student, this aspiration was as professorial as it was intangible. Why worry about global health when the muscles of the back and leg needed memorising? And how did reproductive rights matter when the exam involved peering down a microscope to identify bacteria?"

"I once wrote a report on the inequities I had witnessed on an elective rotation in my Indian home town. He spent hours refining it and encouraged me to aim high. Months later, I excitedly told him that my essay had been accepted for publication in the Lancet. "But wait, they want to remove the best bits," he frowned. A mention in the world’s most prestigious journal was enough for me but this prolific author had other ideas. "Tell the editor why your whole essay deserves to be published." I gasped at the prospect of committing premature career suicide, but he encouraged me to avoid the easy way out. "When you own your work, you signal your integrity." He was right. The Lancet eventually printed my essay in full and his pride outshone my relief. His lesson would accompany me throughout life, and we stayed in touch beyond medical school."

"The dog repays our love by being the only one to faithfully meet and greet us when we come home. Instead of mumbling something unintelligible without looking up from the TV remote, Odie skids and skates to the door, paying no heed to the risk of a fractured leg. His tail wags overtime as he makes cute guttural sounds and promptly rolls over for a belly scratch while holding out hope for a snack. It is impossible to resist anyone who takes such unalloyed pleasure at your presence and whose behaviour is not dictated by what happened at the office that day."

"The dog needs boundaries, I warned, as Odie clambered on to laps and snuggled at various feet, ensconced in the folds of a blanket. Then, like a stealthy invader, he crept up the stairs. And then one day, behold, he was on the big bed where we congregate for family time. I screeched and Odie jumped off. He tried again and I growled. But Odie can read vibes. He knew that the consensus view maintained that shoving an innocent dog off the communal bed was not the done thing."

"The disappearance or decrease in prayer formulas of classical terms indicating the supernatural and the meaning of Christian revelation, first of all that of grace, has favored both the secularization of the rite and of Catholic mentality. Hence few today believe that the liturgical texts serve the priest to talk to God; they evoke a script of which the priest is the director or leading actor, the vogue word of "modern" liturgists."

"Nine years ago I moved to Mexico City for a while to work at a public relations firm, helping them with their English-speaking clients."

"When I was in my 20s, I covered the Kargil war from the frontline. I have grown up as the daughter of India’s first woman war correspondent. Before my mother died when I was 13, she would tell me how the newspaper she was working for did not agree to her going to the war front in 1965. So, she would take a couple of days off and go there with a notepad and a pen, and then start sending stories from there. Many years later, when I said that I wanted to cover the war, the organisation I was working for and the military said, “Absolutely not. We cannot have a woman at the war front"."

"If you’d asked me what it is like to be a woman in this profession 20-30 years ago, I would have said that gender doesn’t matter. But today, gender does matter. At every stage, you have to fight at least four or five times harder, and when you get success, there will be people who will try to punish you for your ambition, professionalism and competence."

"In a changing India, gender finally does not exist only on the margins of public and political attention. It is now center-stage and we are demanding accountability and justice for all."

"It was my endeavour that we restore peace at the earliest possible. If you look at the data you will see that in 72 hours we had put down the riots and brought the situation under control. But these TV channels kept on playing up the same incidents over and over again. At the time, Rajdeep [Sardesai] and Barkha [Dutt] were in the same channel NDTV. During those inflamed days, Barkha acted in the most irresponsible manner. Surat had not witnessed any communal killings, barring a few small incidents of clashes. However the bazaars were closed [as a precautionary measure]. Barkha stood amidst closed shops screaming "This is Surat’s diamond market, but there is not a single police man here.""

"I phoned Barkha and said, "Are you providing the address of this 'unprotected' bazaar to the rioting mobs? Are you inviting them to come and create trouble there by announcing that there is no police here so you can run amok safely?""

"In a second incident in Anjar, she played up the news that a Hanuman mandir [temple] had been broken and vandalized. I told her, "What are you up to? You are in Kutch which is a border district. There you are showing the attack and destruction of a mandir. Do you realize the implications of broadcasting such news? We haven’t yet recovered from the earthquake. Have you actually done proper investigation into the riots? Why are you lighting fires for us? Your news takes a few minutes to broadcast that such and such place is unprotected or a mandir has been vandalized. But it takes for me a few hours to move the police from one disturbed location to another since these incidents are breaking out in the most unexpected places.""

"Personally, I am not prejudicially against wars, as long as wars have international legality, as long as they have an objective, this objective is verified, as long as they are the last resort, and above all as long as we do not play with words, that is, we do not fool people."

"The Constitution of the Italian Republic is far more advanced than Italy and us Italians: it is a smoking worn by a pig."

"The increasingly tired and rhetorical rituals of official commemorations that follow one another from year to year, instead of helping to make remembrance, fuel the molasses effect. Putting everything on the hagiography of the heroic anti-Mafia judge and nothing on those details of his last days of life that, taken one by one, say nothing. But which composed in the chronological mosaic help to understand much, if not everything. Namely, the political-terrorist nature of the Via D'Amelio massacre, with the peculiarities that distinguish it from that of Capaci in spite of the close consecutio temporum, and project it rather on what will happen many months later: the spring-summer 1993 bombs in Milan, Florence and Rome, and then the pax mafiosa that began with the failed (indeed, revoked) bombing of the capital's Olympic stadium, coinciding with the descent into the political arena of Silvio Berlusconi and Marcello Dell'Utri, and continuing to the present day."

"Migrants are human ammunition used in a war bigger than us and them."

"A courageous dissident beyond xenophobic and fascist ideas, which in Italy would have landed him in jail for incitement to racism under the Mancino law."

"You cannot be a Hindu fundamentalist. It does not mean anything .. .The concept of fundamentalism does not exist in Hinduism."

"Each Indian looks for God in his own way and worships one or several of the millions of deities who are the supposed reincarnation or expression of God, a Spirit or a Force. This has never led to a religious war. There have been communal clashes, but India has never had to face religious wars or crusades save those that were thrust on it from outside. The multiple revelation of the East has proved to be in many ways more advantageous than the single revelation of the West."

"I wonder whether our frameworks are more the hangups of our pre-liberal parents than we realise. In the patriarchal, restricted and desperately sexist world that came before, one can imagine that a woman without children may have been a object of concerned pity – because the old gendered denial of career paths, educational opportunities and independent incomes meant that beyond partnership and parenthood there weren't so many other fulfilling experiences for women on offer. Our biological destiny isn't to reproduce – remember? It's just to die, and find ways to meaningfully occupy our time before we do."

"We have a bevy of uneducated people here in Pakistan. They don't know what is [an] atom bomb."

"India's population is over one billion and Pakistan's population is 18 crore. In the event of a nuclear war, even if you inflict four times more casualties on India, there would be more than 20 crore people living in India. But, by then Pakistan will be finished."

"We have an insane horde in Pakistan. These are strange people, who celebrate their own ruin."

"I thought everything was fine in our country, because I thought everything was fine for me. But on my visits to the United States, I began to understand the oppression of women. And as I became more aware, I realized that feminism is a way of life. Feminism isn’t only about support for women; it’s about support for everyone who is victimized or marginalized. I accepted that way of life."

"...for me, doing means contributing, doing for others."

"In her 2014 memoir, Dayan wrote that during her lifetime, she witnessed Israel transform from “a beloved, admired, victorious and just homeland, via an unbearable regression, to the dangerous sphere of ethno-theocratic messianic existence, which is so far removed from a peace- and justice-seeking society."

"For all the progress that has been made, the same old hypocritical notions are still used to fight gender equality."

"Cases of corruption come and go; the public anger they generate is inevitably diluted by the slow pace at which the legal system delivers justice. All the while, the country stays wrapped in a near-permanent bulletproof vest, preparing for the next war even as we recover from the last one."

"For years, we have believed Israel to be a country whose vast military power is tempered by moral strength, supported by social solidarity and guided by well-balanced leadership. The recent war with Hezbollah shattered, at great cost, what was left of this belief. However, to my perhaps overly optimistic eyes, the war may have finally taught us — for the better — the limits of power. Just as a president and a Cabinet minister cannot resort to coercive persuasion when the charms they allegedly exercise fail to convince, so too the government and the military cannot continuously insist that where power has already failed more power will win."

"It is inconceivable that we should still have to discuss the Palestinian right to self-determination,” she told The Star. “We are still doubting that they are people. This is so stupid, it is like an ostrich burying its head."

"We have not yet produced a universal literature in Israel, which doesn't detract from its quality...We are still in a localized phase, reflecting what is happening to us now, a mirror of reality."

"The patriotism, idealism, the caring for others, the sense of involvement are still there, but on top of this is a layer called normalcy...One of the bases of Zionism was called 'normalization of the Jewish people.' This has become a matter of individual preference: videotapes, cars, gadgets. It gives the impression of a change in priorities. It will not last, if only because of the economics that will not allow it...Now that we have normalization and have built a country where my children can wear a Walkman and listen to Michael Jackson, we are complaining: Where is the spirit of Zionism? With the flood of American culture, we, like others, are losing something special of our own culture...With all that, I think we will also retain much."

"Nothing will be the same now. I have looked at cessation of life, destruction of matter, sorrow of destroyers, agony of the victorious, and it had to leave a mark."

"Though the predominant ethos of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel has been enlightened — in both the liberal and socialist senses — large sections of the Israeli society, whether Jewish or Arab, are still strongly patriarchal in their social structure and traditional in their attitudes, with strong religious influences."

"Given the level of education, professional talents and human qualities of Israeli women, it is difficult to understand why their presence is so sparse in the vital crossroads of Israel’s political life without taking into account the heterogeneity and complexity of Israeli society — a society, we shouldn’t forget, that is also struggling to attain peace and security. This social complexity forces those of us struggling to attain full gender equality in Israel to adopt a policy of compromise, bridging of gaps and patient educational work — rather than one of radical feminism, for which many of us may wish. The reality is that today in Israel, human and women’s rights are not yet fully accepted as normative, and are thus not adequately protected."

"Our goal is clear — to attain full equality for women, to prevent discrimination, abuse and violence against them, and to empower and advance the female segment of the population. We believe that in so doing we are not only serving women, but are also strengthening Israeli democracy."

"I have no doubt that once peace is attained in the Middle East, the struggle for the advancement of women and their equality will assume a high priority in our society, and become a subject of cooperation among women in the whole region."

"As I have become involved with the rights of all groups living in Israel, I’ve become more involved with women’s rights, too. Still, I think that women who are involved only in women’s rights are missing the point."

"we have a macho, male society which is not only engaged militarily but is dominated by male tradition religiously and sociologically...Women need to be represented in politics, in lobbying, need to try to achieve legislation. We need to get more women into politics and into the Knesset."

"Women lead the peace movement. They’ve definitely got positions of leadership there."

"If we really can advance towards peace, I see this as a springboard for other changes. Peace and war are irreversible, but other things are less absolute. Since we don’t have a constitution, if there is a change in the law it can be undone later. So it wouldn’t bother me to go along on some concessions and then in better times, say, try and change them. If there is peace, a lot of wrongs will be corrected."

"We started as a society of immigrants; the Palestinians started as people on their land. They’ve expected their state to be delivered to them by outside forces; we had to do it ourselves, and so on down the line. There is no comparison, neither in the time element nor in the content. The point is that they are not going to wait for 2,000 years to have a homeland. Where they are now is where we were before, and the way we demanded and got our rights, they deserve just as much."

"(Do you think that, in general, the large portion of the occupied territories will be returned?) YD: Oh sure, excluding the territory around Jerusalem."

"(How do you advise women who want to be part of the system making changes in present-day Israel? What can you say to women who want to enter politics?) YD: They have to work within the party system — every party — and on the national level with other parties. It cannot be only an effort within the party. The power of women has to be expressed by sheer numbers. It must be mobilization — whether it’s academic or grassroots."

"I finished working, satisfied with my new role as a victim, feeling slightly sorry for myself, somehow heroic. I wasn't just anybody, I was a betrayed woman. (chapter 4)"

"The country woke up on October 24, 1973, a Wednesday, as if it were a wedding day. Cease-fire was expected at any moment, and the words, "The war is over," though not yet uttered by anybody, were ringing in every heart. (beginning of chapter 7)"

"I sat and looked at the familiar living room. A low coffee table, four armchairs and a sofa, embroidered cushions and a whitewashed wall with two original paintings and a few lithographs. Yet, as my eyes examined the objects, I felt strangely out of place. As if the past few weeks had been spent in limbo, as if I were waking up from anesthesia, coming back to life from a shelter. I realized the paradox. I had escaped the war by plunging into the horrors of it. The burnt limbs and faces, the amputees, the invalids, the dead, they became abstract in the nightly duty, and the sound of guns and shells, the diving of aircraft and the roar of tanks advancing-this reality was so far away-sounds overcome and numbed by the silence of hospital corridors. I knew a terrible event had taken place, but I didn't feel it. People died, but I didn't know them. We claimed a victory, but I didn't rejoice in it, and when we were defeated at the beginning, I wasn't frightened. As if I weren't really there. (chapter 8)"

"All the intimacy in the world can't remove a slight sense of guilt when watching someone who isn't aware of being watched. (chapter 14)"

"Yael Dayan was an activist who rejected her father’s fate and life’s choice and sought peace. She spent her life making the country a better place for women, queer folks, refugees, Palestinians, everyone. Yael Dayan’s life describes a country growing more alive, with the passing of decades and generations, to human rights."

"A new woman’s voice in the darkness belongs to Yael Dayan who seems recently to have undergone a feminist metamorphosis."

"We have Yael Dayan and Shani Boianjiu to thank for bringing the Israeli woman soldier’s experiences to life for English readers."

"In Berlin the situation is serious but not desperate; in Vienna, the situation is desperate but not serious."

"We know very well that pensions are ridiculous and that not all the population has pension rights and medical coverage"

"What has been bothering me for the last 20 years is to see families getting more and more nuclearised because they have to adapt to the changing lifestyle"

"Before, it was the children who were taking care of their parents but now it’s the other way round because of the current economic climate that is making it difficult for children to quit their parents’ house at an early age"

"There is a lack of leisure places where the elderly can spend their time. It is heartbreaking to see old men playing checkers with a piece of cardboard and stones in the streets. This will adversely affect their dignity and make them feel marginalised in their own society, which will backfire on their fami­lies"

"We are going to reach a stage in which the government will not be able to pay pensions because there will be a minority (workforce) work­ing for a majority (pensioners)"

"When I travelled in the most re­mote areas in Morocco, I asked the youth about their dream and the an­swer was to leave the countryside"

"We will end up with an ageing population in rural areas because of the youth’s exodus"

"is due to the absence of a solid political structure to improve the standard of living in rural areas."

"Consequently, the cities will find themselves unable to accom­modate the increasing number of country people who are likely to live in substandard housing, which will in turn exacerbate poverty and crime and place considerable strain on their infrastructure, especially schools and hospitals"

"The rural flow is so important that it has surpassed the creation of housing despite the extraordi­nary policy of social housing"

"Right now, we have not seen any long-term strategies and policies that can adapt to these situations. It is good to project the country’s future population but the main question is: What are we going to do today to solve these problems?"

"there used to be some degree of tolerance as Moroccans would not incriminate, condemn or judge homosexuals"

"More youngsters go to the mosque and feel invested in the mission to defend Islam against disbelievers who want to destroy it and push Muslims towards fornication and deprivation"

"New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan, while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. ... It is the first American section to be finished, to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America."

"The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. When you reach the line which marks that drop — for convenience the one hundredth meridian — you have reached the West."

"Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom."

"Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey."

"Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate."

"No one can say fully what sublimity means, or how the awe or terror or exaltation inspired by the earth in torment affects him; but everyone, even the shallowest sightseer, the strident and aggressive woman in purple rayon slacks shouldering others aside to look at the Great White Throne, is enlarged by the experience. The sightseer may lack vocabulary, even concept, to speak of the one in the many, eternity moving through forms of change, the flowing away at once of time and earth, but there remain mystery and the fulfillment of identity, and he will be richer than he was. It is the same with aesthetics: one may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification. The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizen."

"Biography seemed to be no more than a high-spirited game of yanking out shirttails and setting fire to them."

"The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole."

"The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act."

"The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the walls withdraw, the weight is lifted, the specters fade. Nerve-ends that stuck through your skin like bristles when you blotted the last line on your manuscript or closed the office door behind you have withdrawn into their sheaths, your pulse slows, your heart lifts. The day was not so bad as it seemed, the season has not been so bad, maybe there is sense or even promise in going on."

"Our friend alcohol was given us of the gods to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger, than without its vision there is any evidence we are."

"When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour."

"You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest-lived. The fragile tie of ecstasy is broken in a few minutes, and thereafter there can be no remarriage."

"Nothing can be done with people who put olives in martinis, presumably because in some desolate childhood hour someone refused them a dill pickle and so they go through life lusting for the taste of brine."

"This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn."

"Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows."

"That other supreme American gift to world culture, the martini cocktail, will do only at its own hour — when darkness begins to fall from the wings of night and the heart cries out for a swift healing."

"We are a pious people but a proud one too, aware of a noble lineage and a great inheritance. Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which by far the worst is rum. Nevertheless, we have improved man's lot and enriched his civilization with rye, bourbon and the Martini cocktail. In all history has any other nation done so much?"

"Don't have much to do with people who drink sherry at any time except with soup; there's something wrong with them."

"Orange bitters make a good astringent for the face. Never put them in anything that is to be drunk."

"Remember always that the three abominations are: (1) rum, (2) any other sweet drink, and (3) any mixed drink except one made of gin and dry vermouth in the ratio I have given."

"In the South, a lady’s opinions could not be more important than a drawing-room charade, an accompaniment to sillabubs and cobbler."

"The migration was under way. ... Its great days were just around the turn of spring — and an April restlessness, a stirring in the blood, a wind from beyond the oak openings, spoke of the prairies, the great desert, and the western sea."

"The common man fled westward. A thirsty land swallowed him insatiably. There is no comprehending the frenzy of the American folk-migration. God’s gadfly had stung us mad."

"Hetæræ accompany the fine arts in association with quick money. They came to Virginia as soon as the true value of the Comstock was perceived. They constituted, no doubt, a deplorable source of gambling, pleasure and embroilment. They were not soft-spoken women, their desire was not visibly separable from the main chance, and they would have beheld Mr. Harte’s portrayal of them at Poker Flat with ribald mirth. But let them have a moment of respect. They civilized the Comstock. They drove through its streets reclining in laquered broughams, displaying to male eyes fashions as close to Paris as any then current in New York. They were, in brick houses hung with tapestries, a glamour and a romance, after the superheated caverns of the mines. They enforced a code of behavior: one might be a hard-rock man outside their curtains but in their presence one was punctilious or one was hustled away. They brought Parisian cooking to the sagebrush of Sun Mountain and they taught the West to distinguish between tarantula juice and the bouquet of wines. An elegy for their passing. The West has neglected to mention them in bronze and its genealogies avoid comment on their marriages, conspicuous or obscure, but it owes them a here acknowledged debt for civilization."

"California was almost entirely dream, a dream vague but deep in the minds of a westering people."

"The nation had had two symbols of solitude, the forest and the prairies; now it had a third, the mountains."

"The route led through the enchanted chaos of the Arizona deserts, a country mostly of naked rock in mesas, peaks, and gashed canyons, painted tremendous colors with brushes of comet’s hair. Frequently it was a giant-cactus country — saguaro by designers of modern decoration, cholla by medieval torturers — or a country of yuccas and the yucca’s weirdest form, the Joshua tree. Sometimes it was even a grass country. And through most of the route it was a country where occasionally you could find the characteristic oasis of the Southwest, a little, hidden arroyo with something of a stream in it, choked with cottonwoods, green plants blooming only a rifle shot from desolation."

"Mr. Lincoln was telling his countrymen that the achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire, and he was telling them that Yesterday must not be permitted to Balkanize it."

"Between the amateur and the professional, ... there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different integration, a different nervous and muscular and psychological organization. ... A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom."

"No one will ever tell in full the heroism or the stupidity of the foreign missions, the holiness-saturated devotion of the missionaries or their invincible foolishness. There were only two agencies for the extension of civilization on a large scale, armies and missions, and in the light of history the primitives who drew the armies were much the better off. The missionary was a man glad to submerge self in a holy cause but, except in a minority so small it does not count, his dedication locked him away from reality so completely that at this distance he seems crazed if not crazy. The heathen were not people to him: they were souls."

"The missionaries were vortices of force thrown out in advance by the force to the eastward that was making west. They thought that they came to bring Christ but in thinking so they were deceived. They were agents of a historical energy and what they brought was the United States. The Indians had no chance. If it looked like religion it was nevertheless Manifest Destiny."

"History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance."

"The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn."

"You have to raise your child the way your child needs to be raised."

"The worst you can do is believe yourself to be any more than what you actually are."

"Just believe in who you are. Period."

"And if you really believe in your heart of hearts that you have the talent, go for it."

"It means the world that there is a universe in which these kinds of stories are able to attract interest and wide viewership where we are centering the experiences of not just Southeast Asian people, but it's Southeast Asian women."

"And now for me to come in as a woman from Southeast Asia, as a woman from the Philippines, and kind of getting into this mix, it's just one episode, but it's like, it's nice to be able to center women's stories and the stories of women of color."

"And it's incredibly empowering to be a part of something like this."

"You have to raise your child the way your child needs to be raised, where they are, no matter their background or identity. Literally any kid. Queer or otherwise."

"As a parent, I want to set my child up for success. I want my child to feel safe and strong and ready to conquer the world on their own terms."

"I was really concerned with how conservative audiences in the Philippine were going to take it, because my career up at that point was just very wholesome. And I was a child entertainer, performer. I was about to turn the page in a really big way. Because back home actors especially actresses you were really either wholesome or really not. There was no gray area"

"My first job, my first time in front of a paying audience, first time to get paid for work. I don't remember the paycheck being anything big (it's theater, meaning it wasn’t) but I loved the experience so much!"

"Musical theater is quite an unpredictable, sometimes think-on-your-feet type of art form. I’ve learned how to raise a child who is their own being. I mean, there are obviously expectations. I’m glad this kid can cook and do his own laundry and doesn’t forget to feed the cat."

"But the one thing I’ve learned is that you have to raise your child the way your child needs to be raised."

"Just now woke up to this bit of amazing news!"

"My son and every single trans kid out there, they are bravely trying to navigate the world as who they are, despite an environment that seems hostile to their existence, so I have to lift up every single kid that has to do this."

"It’s important for me to speak up for kids like my own kid, because trans folks are being erased, as if their existence never happened. But trans folks have been around forever."

"The only thing that trans folks, any LGBT person wants, is to exist and to live and to love in the way that they were born to. Full stop…"

"The one thing I’ve learned is that you have to raise your child the way your child needs to be raised… As a parent I want to set my child up for success. I want my child to feel safe and strong and ready to conquer the world on their own terms."

"Playing her again 30 years later is going to be illuminating."

"This is the most precious human being in my little world. The one who captured my heart from the word go. The one that made me realize how insignificant my life was, until that initial piercing cry at 12:12 PM on May 16, 2006."

"With each step into adulthood, my heart grows in ways I couldn’t have predicted. That he is, with honesty and courage, growing into who he’s meant to be makes me incredibly proud."

"This is my 18-year-old. My artistic, sensitive, creative, smart, beautiful, affectionate, loving, incredible 18-year-old. I’m beyond blessed and fortunate to call this one mine."

"I'm here in this very strange country with a culture that's so very different from mine. I need to hang on to a little bit of home to not go insane."

"I try to be cool and not get too emotional, but it's like 'Oh wow.' To be able to be that person to someone, it's pretty crazy and really wonderful, and to continue to work in the Philippines where you're with your people, creating theater."

"Just a reminder… I have boundaries. Do not cross them. Thank you,"

"The story is important but not to the point of emotional manipulation of the audience. It has to supplement the talent."

"It has to be talent first. Because that’s how we got them in the first place."

"You discover how much motivation you actually have. Really."

"The funny thing… kids are easy to mold. They’re so easy to teach and they’re so open to suggestions."

"You can basically throw all the stuff at the wall and see what sticks. In her case, she throws everything at the wall and everything sticks."

"I look at the awards and I'm incredibly grateful. But a career like mine would not be possible without a village, without a support system, without the people who are actively behind me"

"It’s a song [about] being a Filipino that’s been transplanted to another country, and you are remembering what it is about home that you remember and love so much."

"If [you’re] a mom who remembers the first movements of your child while they were still in the womb, it’s the excitement of that."

"External link=="

"Guilt isn't in cat vocabulary. They never suffer remorse for eating too much, sleeping too long or hogging the warmest cushion in the house. They welcome every pleasurable moment as it unravels and savour it to the full until a butterfly or falling leaf diverts their attention. They don't waste energy counting the number of calories they've consumed or the hours they've frittered away sunbathing."

"Cats don't beat themselves up about not working hard enough. They don't get up and go, they sit down and stay. For them, lethargy is an art form. From their vantage points on top of fences and window ledges, they see the treadmills of human obligations for what they are - a meaningless waste of nap time.”"

"“People persuade themselves they deserve easy lives, that being human makes us somehow exempt from pain. The theory works fine until we face the inevitable challenges. Our conditioning of denial in no way equips us to deal with the difficult times that not one of us escapes."

"Cleo's motto seemed to be: Life's tough and that's okay, because life is also fantastic. Love it, live it - but don't be fooled into thinking it's not harsh sometimes. Those who've survived periods of bleakness are often better at savoring good times and wise enough to understand that good times are actually great.”"

"Then there was the realisation that I didn't actually feel that much better when I was thin(ner). In fact the 'thin' version felt worse because I lived with hunger clawing at my stomach all the time, and in fear that I was going to get fat again. After years of neuroticism I'd finally understood those who loved me would continue to put up with me fat or thin, and those who didn't ignored me. As a middle-aged woman I was pretty much invisible anyway. To pass unnoticed through an image-obsessed society is surprisingly liberating"

"One of the many ways in which cats are superior to humans is their mastery of time. By making no attempt to dissect years into months, days into hours and minutes into seconds, cats avoid much misery. Free from the slavery of measuring every moment, worrying whether they are late or early, young or old, or if Christmas is six weeks away, felines appreciate the present in all its multidimensional glory. They never worry about endings or beginnings. From their paradoxical viewpoint an ending is often a beginning. The joy of basking on a window ledge can seem eternal, though if measured in human time it's diminished to a paltry eighteen minutes."

"He'd also developed his own version of making the most of every minute. "Through Sam I found out how quickly things can change. Because of him I've learned to appreciate each moment and try not to hold on to things. Life's more exciting and intense that way. It's like the yogurt that goes off after three days. It tastes so much better than the stuff that lasts three weeks."

"If humans could program themselves to forget time, they would savor a string of pleasures and possibilities. Regrets about the past would dissolve, alongside anxieties for the future. We'd notice the color of the sky and be liberated to seize the wonder of being alive in this moment. If we could be more like cats our lives would seem eternal.”"

"“I used to wish I had an easier life," he mused. "Some families sail through years with nothing touching them. They have no tragedies. They go on about how lucky they are. Yet sometimes it seems to me they're half alive. When something goes wrong for them, and it does for everyone sooner or later, their trauma is much worse. They've had nothing bad happen to them before. In the meantime, they think little problems, like losing a wallet, are big deals. They think it's ruined their day. They have no idea what a hard day's like. It's going to be incredibly tough for them when they find out.""

"In 2012, the Chinese sociologist Sūn Lìpíng (b. 1955) suggested the PRC [People's Republic of China] faced four possible paths. One was return to Mao-style egalitarian populism, reducing inequality and corruption but risking the violence and irrationality of the Mao era. Another was to deepen the reforms – further privatizing the economy regardless of increased inequality. The third was to maintain the status quo. The fourth was to pursue reform while applying notions of fairness, justice, and universal values."