"Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four."

"I mean, the computer industry promises nothing. Did you ever read a shrink-wrapped license agreement? You should read one. It basically says, if this product deliberately kills your children, and we knew it would, and we decided not to tell you because it might harm sales, we're not liable. I mean, it says stuff like that. They're absurd documents. You have no rights."

"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state."

"Elections serve two purposes. The first, and obvious, purpose is to accurately choose the winner. But the second is equally important: to convince the loser."

"Against the average user, anything works; there's no need for complex security software. Against the skilled attacker, on the other hand, nothing works."

"Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. "How will authors and artists get paid for their work?" they ask me. Truth be told, I don't know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: "How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?" I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either."

"Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet."

"It's certainly easier to implement bad security and make it illegal for anyone to notice than it is to implement good security."

"A few years ago I heard a quotation, and I am going to modify it here: If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology."

"The lesson here is that it is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics. Encryption is too important to be left solely to governments."

"Attacks always get better, they never get worse."

"There is nothing as uplifting and inspiring as the Upanishads."

"The youth established an organization called Panun Kashmir and they declared as their goal the unrealistic idea of a homeland for the Hindus within the valley. This was more a cry of helplessness than anything else."

"This campaign of terror was nowhere as widespread and sustained as in Kashmir. The Hindus fled their homes and took refuge wherever they could, with their lives shattered forever. As refugees, hundreds of miles away from their homes, they were housed in one-room hovels in Jammu. I was invited to give a speech at a meeting called by young Kashmiris in Jammu in December 1991 to reflect on what should be done. I got an opportunity to see first-hand the condition of the refugees, and it was heartbreaking."

"An evil wind destroyed that old Kashmir. I had a premonition of this disaster on a visit thirty years ago in the averted eyes, in the barely concealed rage in people I knew. It was a rage unlike the one that sprouts from a personal wrong. It was like a fog that hung over the place in heavy layers, covering everyone, even those who would normally be happy in their own world."

"I got to visit the ruins of the Mārtaṇḍa Temple on the Mattan Karewa, built by Emperor Lalitāditya, many times. Built of stone, it is characterized by the simplicity of its conception: it is rectangular in plan, consisting of a maṇḍapa and a shrine. Two other shrines flank the maṇḍapa. It is enclosed by a vast courtyard by a peristyle wall with 84 secondary shrines in it. The columns of the peristyle are fluted. Each of the 84 niches originally contained an image of a form of Sūrya. The number 84, as 21×4, appears to have been derived from the numerical association of 21 with the sun. It must have looked like a jeweled treasure on the plateau over Anantnag."

"A culture is like a lens through which people construct their world."

"Since language is linear, whereas the unfolding of the universe takes place in a multitude of dimensions, language is limited in its ability to describe reality."

"The idea of consciousness requires not only an awareness of things, but also the awareness that one is aware."

"If social media can bring the sense of freedom, it can also bind people into delusional cults."

"If chess is about decisive victory by vanquishing the enemy by taking the fight to the place where the king is located, weiqi is about consolidation of territory."

"One is not a single self, although there is some common thread holding together disparate incarnations."

"The clash of civilizations is nothing but a clash of different myths."

"The dance of the peacock attracts not only the peahen but also the human."

"Europe has resurrected its pagan gods."

"If the heart sorrows over physical loss, the spirit rejoices over hope of understanding."

"Modern life alienates us from Nature, even our own."

"Ritual is intimately connected with the mask, either in the wearing that hides the true face, or in the adoption of a public face."

"History is scraps of evidence joined by the glue of imagination."

"When the mind grasps the universe, the senses retreat."

"The body is like the wife to the spirit. The two must cohabit to create new forms, but their pleasures rarely coincide."

"Gods have many faces."

"Man is a mimic animal, happiest acting a part, needing a mask to tell the truth."

"People embrace false magical theories in the hope something good will come out of them. In the most extreme of these, good comes out of them only at the end of this life, in paradise."

"I have so much of desire that desire itself is my fulfillment."

"The world is a game of information and paradox."

"What is the chance that one can roll up the sky like a hide?"

"The best paradise is the paradise we are exiled from."

"Indian Anglosphere indifference to #KashmiriPandit genocide & expulsion is a shameful episode of recent history. Look at the Yazidis; their genocide and sex-slavery is not rationalized. The Indian Anglosphere lives in a cocoon of self-hate, self-deception and brazen mendacity."

"Beauty takes us to a space that is ineffable, a place of secrets."

"The essence of the Vedas is a narrative on who the experiencing self is. Ordinary science informs us of the relationships between objects and also their transformations. But the Vedas say that this ordinary science leaves out the self who observes these objects."

"Men and women in their mutual attraction are driven to the very emptiness they are trying to avoid."

"Once scientists and scholars invest parts of their career in support of a paradigm, it becomes a sort of a self-betrayal to abandon it."

"Like other social media platforms, Wikipedia has evolved into an echo chamber where the user is presented with only one type of content instead of being shown a balanced narrative. This disinformation is powerful since the articles are written in an academic style and users do not see other sources that disagree with the article.... Some editors of Wikipedia are failed academics with demonic energy who wish to conquer anonymously what they were unable to do in their normal careers. And spending much of their working life editing Wikipedia articles and by the use of multiple anonymous handles they have obtained administrative status which entitles them to block opposing views. The anonymous persona of the editors and the low stakes have made Wikipedia politics much more vicious than real politics."

"One of the things I really like about programming languages is that it's the perfect excuse to stick your nose into any field. So if you're interested in high energy physics and the structure of the universe, being a programmer is one of the best ways to get in there. It's probably easier than becoming a theoretical physicist."

"If you do anything useful it will haunt you forever after, and if you have a major success you get decades of hard manual labor — meaning you have to work on the manual."

"Maybe "just one little global variable" isn't too unmanageable, but that style leads to code that is useless except to its original programmer."

"Proof by analogy is fraud."

"Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost."

"A program that has not been tested does not work."