All Quotes

"Art is not a plaything, nor an ornamantal activity but an expression of life—it gives glimpse of life."

"It was 1950. I was then studying Journalism in London and was attached to the "Daily Telegraph” I was scanning the news of the morning. Suddenly I found the “copy" containing the list of successful candidates who had passed their Bar-at-Law Examination Mustafa’s name was there. I rang him up at his residence and congratulated him on his success At six in the evening Mustafa came to my flat with lots of eatables and to express his gratitude to me for letting him know his results piping-hot from the newspaper office. Such was the man who is no more in the land of the living."

"Capitalism is not necessarily more immoral than previous social systems with regard to cruelty to humans and the gratuitous destruction of nature. As a mode of production and a social system, however, capitalism requires people to be destructive of the environment. Three destructive aspects of the capitalist system stand out when we view this system in relation to the extinction crisis: 1) capitalism tends to degrade the conditions of its own production; 2) it must expand ceaselessly in order to survive; 3) it generates a chaotic world system, which in turn intensifies the extinction crisis."

"It was Brig. Saheb Dad who was President of the East Pakistan Sports Federation during Martial Law period when Kabir of Mohammedan Sporting Club and a Pakistani International football player was placed under suspension for some reason or other. Mohamedan Sporting Club was to play one of its vital League's match and Kabir's services was needed badly. It was Mustafa Bhai who came forward to the rescue of the club. It was learnt on the eve of the match day that Brig Saheb Dad was having his dinner at a friend's i residence. Mustafa Bhai, as a real lover of sports, did not hesitate to go and waited there outside the house for quite a long time till Brig Saheb Dad came out to leave for his residence. Mustafa Bhai approached him with Kabir's mercy petition and requested him to allow Kabir to play on the following day. To be very frank Brig Saheb Dad felt embarrassed seeing a person of such stature waiting for him outside a house at the dark of night and for such a small matter. He immediately assured that the suspension will be lifted. Kabir played on the following day. These may be small matters but they show one's sincere love and feelings towards sports, and sportsmen."

"I have so much affection for Mustafa, Pakistan and Kashmir were always on his lips"

"Low-quality roads also raise more poor people out of poverty per yuan invested than high-quality roads, making them a win–win strategy for growth in agriculture and poverty alleviation."

"The creation of agricultural enterprises represents one of the most effective ways to stimulate rural development."

"technical trade barriers to new technologies are still used in subtle forms around the world. Fundamentally, such restrictions are intended to protect existing industries by keeping new products out of the market."

"There are similarities, as well as obvious differences, in the epic of the Mormon Battalion and the epic of Tai Ji Men struggle for peace and justice, as described in the book “Who Stole Their Youth?” In both cases, a generation of members of a minority spiritual movement suffered persecution. In both cases, youth answered generously to the need of protecting their movement from persecution and to the inspired worlds of their leader."

"The bestowal on the Chairman of the Commission on the power to grant gun ban exemptions and place Election Areas of Concern under Comelec Control based on the vague and arbitrary phrase of ‘meritorious and urgent cases’ essentially rendered futile or pointless the functions of the CBFSC. In protest, I hereby irrevocably resign as CBFSC chairperson effective immediately."

"Inting quits ‘in protest’ as chair of Comelec gun ban panel Inquirer"

"He who utters these words speaks the truth: There’s no turning back from what has been decreed/destined. Nothing squanders the benefits of reason more than desire and stubbornness. Nothing is more futile than advice given to a person who is not prepared to accept and endure it. Nothing brings punishment more swiftly or with worse consequences than oppression and betrayal. Nor is there anything that brings greater shame and disgrace than excessive boasting and pride."

"La parladura Francesca val mais et [es] plus avinenz a far romanz e pasturellas; mas cella de Lemozin val mais per far vers et cansons et serventés; et per totas las terras de nostre lengage son de major autoritat li cantar de la lenga Lemosina que de negun'autra parladura, per qu'ieu vos en parlarai primeramen."

"Perhaps we would have forestalled [human] extinction if Louis Pasteur had abandoned his studies on the germ theory. What about the plant pathologists who scorned centuries of superstitions and identified the fungi responsible for cereal diseases? They made it possible to combat the rusts and smuts that wasted crops and allowed modern agriculture to feed us in our billions. Science is so central to modern civilization that we will not willingly retreat from the continuing exploration and manipulation of nature."

"Humans and other bipedal apes have pursued our distinctively destructive path for a sliver of the total biotime in this corner of the galaxy. This most recent reshaping of nature began 3.3 million years ago, when an australopithecine made stone tools to butcher animal carcasses on the shores of the Jade Sea, or Lake Turkana, in Kenya. Weapons came later, with the use of stone-tipped thrusting spears by another hominid in South Africa 500,000 years ago, and the development of the bow and arrow by early humans 71,000 years ago. Projectile weapons, like the bow and arrow, allowed us to kill large animals without being excessively brave. Through a combination of these weapons, coupled with traps and fire, humans saw to the extinction of woolly mammoths, mastodons, sabre-toothed cats and ground sloths as the ice sheets receded and we pursued the animals to their last redoubts. A South American armadillo-like animal called Glyptodon was another victim of the genocide. This slow-moving vegetarian was as big as a Volkswagen Beetle and served as an easy target for hunters who ate its meat and crawled into its enormous shells for shelter. For many years, biologists argued that climate change was the most important factor in these extinctions, but more and more evidence points to the correspondence between the arrival of humans and the disappearance of large mammals. The case was pretty obvious for the spectacular bird life of islands, with a giant turkey called Sylviornis disappearing from New Caledonia soon after the prehistoric Lapita people arrived in their canoes 3,500 years ago, and the elimination of numerous species of flightless moa when the Maori reached New Zealand around AD 1300. Extinction has been reworking nature from its beginnings, but no animal has come close to having the impact that humans have had. With remarkable speed, our evolution walloped life with the power of the asteroid that obliterated the dinosaurs. The average size of mammals increased steadily throughout the Cenozoic Era that followed the crash of the Chicxulub asteroid in the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago. Then, around 100,000 years ago, the big animals began to disappear. The extinctions accelerated 50,000 years ago and the total mass of wild mammals has now plunged to a sixth of its pre-human maximum. According to some models, the domestic cow is on track to become the largest remaining mammal. thumb|We cannot miss something that has never existed for us. We read about extinction as an approaching horror and ecosystem damage as a work in progress rather than a done deal. Scepticism surrounding these doom-laden predictions about the precarious nature of nature is understandable. It takes imagination to escape from the influence of the diminishing expectations of each generation. Nobody has seen a live moa since the fourteenth century and so their absence does not upset New Zealanders today. The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died in my local zoo in 1914, and the most recent sky-darkening mass migrations of these birds took flight in the nineteenth century. We cannot miss something that has never existed for us. We read about extinction as an approaching horror and ecosystem damage as a work in progress rather than a done deal. But the destruction is unabated. Despite the publicity given to deforestation, tropical woodlands continue to disappear at an annual rate of 2.7 million hectares in Brazil, 1.3 million hectares in Indonesia and 0.6 million hectares in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Turning to the direct effects of climate change, one-third of the world’s coral reefs were damaged by high water temperatures in 2016. More than 90 per cent of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was affected by the process called bleaching, which happens when the dinoflagellate algae abandon their animal partners in the exquisite coral symbiosis. When reefs recover from bleaching, the original animals are replaced by sluggish coral species that support impoverished communities of marine life. This is not a normal phenomenon."

"Humans are not the only organisms to have affected the live-ability of Earth. Microbes and plants changed the chemistry of the atmosphere long before we leapt on to the stage. Bacteria initiated a momentous change 2.3 billion years ago when they began flooding the air with a noxious gas called oxygen. Microorganisms that had been happily ‘breathing’ iron, sulphur and nitrogen for the first million millennia of biology were decimated by this highly reactive, DNA-damaging molecule. As oxygen levels rose, the metal-breathers and their kin retreated to marine muds and other oxygen-free quarters. New life forms evolved to take advantage of the peculiar conditions and found a way to use oxygen to rip more energy from their food, which is why we breathe deeply today."

"We live on a Goldilocks planet that has nurtured life as it has sailed through billions of laps around the Sun. Animals evolved from microbes that resembled sperm cells that wriggled in the sea; great apes, or hominids, were born 15 to 20 million years ago; apes like us, called hominins, arose in Africa more recently, and modern humans with fine-boned skeletons have been prancing around for less than 100,000 years. Plants assemble their tissues from carbon dioxide and the power of sunbeams, and we are energized by eating them and the flesh of animals that graze on fruits and vegetables. The digestive system releases small molecules from our food and these are propelled around the body in blood vessels to sustain every cell. The architecture and operation of the body is detailed in a cluttered instruction manual written in 20,000 genes spotted along 2 m of DNA. Construction takes nine months and includes wiring a big brain that endows the owner with a sense of self and the illusion of free will. Ageing of the body is unfaltering; after a few decades, the animal stops working and is decomposed."

"Hypochondria seems to be a (that is, a response to) so many different kinds of troubles that the disorder assumes dozens of different forms. Taken together the hypochondrias are so common, in fact, that some doctors believe that they are among the most common symptoms of . ... Is this because among certain groups hypochondria is a more socially acceptable expression of distress than divorce, , alcoholism, and the like? Is it biologically or psychologically more efficient than other defenses?"

"In 1909, Sigmund Freud told the that "the position of hypochondria is still suspended in darkness," and more than a hundred years later it does not feel as if there is much light on the subject. Even in the most widely used and up-to-date clinical literature, its definition is still shifting and changing. For instance, for the latest edition of the ' ('), which was published in 2013 by the and is often referred to as "the bible of psychiatry," the diagnosis of hypochondria was entirely recategorized into two separate entities: and illness anxiety disorder. Both describe patients with "extensive worries about health," but the former features so-called somatic or physical symptoms the patient feels in their body that medicine cannot detect or explain, whereas the latter is focused solely on "preoccupation with having or acquiring a serious illness" and "excessive health-related behaviors.""

"A letter containing four pages or more, closely written and narrating the writer's own disorders, is a sure and certain of hypochondria."

"... my therapist tells me that to worry unceasingly about getting cancer is as irrational as worrying about getting hit by a on . In fact, I am terrified of getting hit by a bus on Flatbush Avenue, and I think he is the madman for being so cavalier on the subject. Has he been out there recently? Belling says that hypochondria is “always ironic,” by which she means that, despite all its convolutions, hypochondria is always right. You will get sick and die. The question is only when and how. The bus is coming."

"He who, in the study or the treatment of the human machinery, overlooks the intellectual part of it, cannot but entertain very incorrect notions of its nature, and fall into gross and sometimes fatal blunders in the means which he adopts for its regulation and repair. Whilst he is directing his purblind skill to remove or relieve some more obvious and superficial , the worm of may be gnawing inwardly and undetected at the root of the constitution."

"Are hypochondriacs born or made? Is the product of your particular roll of the genetic dice, or the result of something in your childhood or environment? These questions are worth asking, because people like me cost the extra trouble and money. We're constantly making appointments for symptoms that feel real bur aren't. We doubt our s, so we seek second and third and even fourth opinions asking for (or demanding) unnecessary medical tests, and running up , too."

"After died in 1380, his 11-year-old son was next in line to inherit the throne. However, for the next 8 years it would be his uncles who ruled in his stead, spending money from the royal treasury and extorting heavy taxes from the common people. Overthrowing these avaricious regents and replacing them with highly competent advisors earned young Charles VI the title of ‘the Beloved’. Just a few years later, this title would be replaced by one not so kind: ‘le fou’ or ‘the mad’. In 1392, Charles had what was thought to be the first psychotic episode of many. During a military expedition he became paranoid, and when a servant accidently dropped a lance, Charles turned around and began attacking his own knights, some of whom died. In another episode Charles came to believe that he was made of glass – the , which would occur intermittently throughout his life. noted that Charles even had iron rods sewn into his clothes as reinforcement to stop him from breaking. Although perhaps the most famous person to suffer from the glass delusion, Charles was by no means the only one – in the 15th to 16th centuries it was not uncommon for such delusions to be reported. Case numbers dropped after this period, and cases of the glass delusion are now rare."

"Hypochondriacs tend to have a specific preoccupation – cancer, infertility, an – and scan their body for evidence to support this conviction, which sets off the “falling dominos of catastrophisation”. But hypochondria also overlaps with and (when or emotion manifests as pain, weakness or similar symptoms that don’t fit a pattern that can be readily explained)."

"In the long run, extinctions of species are as inevitable as the deaths of individual animals, and it may be that the causes of extinctions are as varied as the causes of individual deaths.A wave of extinctions—a sudden diminution in the number of species—is analogous to a sudden big drop in the size of a human population, an event that deserves to be explained even though the individual people would inevitably have died sooner or later anyway. Catastrophes in human populations have many causes: war, famine, and pestilence are the possibilities that first spring to mind. There may be equally many causes for evolutionary catastrophes, as waves of extinctions could well be called. Another possibility, however, is that extinctions come in waves that are part of a recurring cycle. It would then be the cycle itself, rather than each individual wave in the cycle, that would need to be explained. If there is such a cycle, it presumably follows a cycle in the inorganic world, such as cyclic climactic changes."

"From the time the European invaders of North America established themselves and began keeping records, the bitter winters of the Little Ice Age become part of written history.From that point also, the natural history of northern North America began to deviate from its “natural” course. The continent was no longer isolated. The foreign invaders multiplied rapidly, destroying native ecosystems at an ever increasing rate. In time, the byproducts of technology began to poison earth, water, and air and have now begun to influence the climate. The measured responses of biosphere to climate, and of climate to astronomical controls have, for the foreseeable future, come to an end."

"In news programmes and political programmes, we have seen Nietzsche's principle of “there are no facts, only interpretations” reign supreme. A few years earlier, philosophers had proposed this as the path to emancipation, and in fact it presented itself as a justification for saying and doing whatever one wanted. Thus, the true meaning of Nietzsche's saying was revealed: “The strongest reason is always the best”. It is also for this reason, I believe, that claims of philosophical realism have come to the fore since the end of the last century."

"Living in certainty, for what we have said so far, is not living in truth. And precisely in the name of truth, we must observe that the promise of certainty [...] gives peace. But it is also true that peace, as Kafka said, is what one wishes for ashes. (p. 106)"

"But we must be realistic in relation to realities."

"Ontology simply means: the world has its laws, and it enforces them. The mistake of the postmoderns was based on a simple confusion between ontology and epistemology, between what is and what we know about what is. It is clear that in order to know that water is H2O, I need language, schemata and categories. But water wets and fire burns whether I know it or not, regardless of languages and categories. At a certain point, there is something that resists us. This is what I call “unamendability”, the salient characteristic of the real. This may certainly be a limitation, but at the same time it provides us with the very foothold that allows us to distinguish dreams from reality and science from magic."

"Humanity must save itself, and certainly never ever can a God do so. We need knowledge, truth and reality. Not accepting them, as postmodern philosophy and political populism have done, means following the alternative, always possible, proposed by the Grand Inquisitor: following the path of miracles, mystery and authority."

"Postmodernism has found full political and social realisation. Recent years have taught us a bitter truth – namely, that the primacy of interpretations over facts, the overcoming of the myth of objectivity, has been achieved, but it has not had the emancipatory results prophesied by professors. [...] The real world has certainly become a fairy tale, or rather [...] it has become a “reality”, but the result has been media populism, a system in which (provided you have the power) you can claim to make people believe anything. In television news and talk shows, we have witnessed the reign of “There are no facts, only interpretations”, which – with what is unfortunately a fact and not an interpretation – has shown its true meaning: “The strongest argument is always the best”. (pp. 5-6)"

"The area in which scepticism and the abandonment of truth have shown their most aggressive face has been politics. Here, post-modern de-objectification has been, exemplarily, the philosophy of the Bush administration, which theorised that reality was simply the belief of “reality-based communities”, i.e. of naive people who do not know how the world works. We found the most concise expression of this practice in the response of a Bush adviser to journalist Ron Suskind."

"R. Susskind, “”Faith, certainty and the presidency of George W. Bush“”, “'nytimes.com”', 17 October 2004."

"We are now an empire, and when we act, we create our own reality. A reality that you observers study, and on which we then create other realities that you will study again." An arrogant absurdity, of course: but eight years earlier, the philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard had argued that the Gulf War was nothing more than television fiction. (p. 23)"

"Instead of recognising reality and imagining another world to be realised in place of the first, [postmodernism] posits reality as a fairy tale and assumes that this is the only possible liberation: so that there is nothing to be realised, and after all, there is nothing to be imagined either: on the contrary, it is a matter of believing that reality is like a dream that cannot hurt and that satisfies. (p. 24)"

"Realism is the premise of criticism, while irrealism is characterised by acquiescence, the fairy tale told to children to help them fall asleep. (p. 30)"

"In constructionism, we observe [...] a strategy [...] that exalts the role of the professor in the construction of reality: its fundamental text is Foucault“s ”'The Order of Things, which states that man is constructed by the human sciences and could disappear with them. (pp. 43-44)"

"To assert that everything is socially constructed and that there are no facts, only interpretations, is not to deconstruct but, on the contrary, to formulate a thesis – all the more accommodating in reality the more critical it is in the imagination – that leaves everything as it was before. (p. 70)"

"Far from being fluid, modernity is the era in which words are stones, and in which the nightmare of “'verba manent”' is realised. (p. 78)"

"Just as in “there are no facts, only interpretations”, one can always turn the argument against weak thought by saying that if the explanation of the link between violence and truth is a truth, then weak thought is responsible for the very violence it condemns. (p. 91)"

"Even at a superficial level, the objections that weak thought raises to truth as violence are objections to violence, not to truth, and are therefore based on a misunderstanding. Omitting these circumstances leads us to situations with no way out: power is always right; or, conversely, counter-power is always wrong; and even, in a rather perverse form, counter-power and counter-knowledge – even if it belongs to a mafioso or a witch – are always right. (p. 91)"

"In its “prima facie” manifestation, the idea of truth as pure power is a very resigned, almost desperate statement: “the strongest argument is always the best”. But, in fact, there is reason to be more hopeful: reality itself, for example the fact that it is true that the wolf is upstream and the lamb is downstream, and therefore cannot muddy its water, is the basis for restoring justice. For, contrary to what many postmodernists believe, there are good reasons to believe, based above all on the teachings of history, that reality and truth have always been the protection of the weak against the bullying of the strong. If, on the other hand, a philosopher says that “so-called ‘truth’ is a question of power”, why is he a philosopher instead of a magician?"

"Hence the “impasse”: if knowledge is power, the instance that must produce emancipation, i.e. knowledge, is at the same time the instance that produces subordination and domination. And that is why, with yet another somersault, radical emancipation can only be achieved through non-knowledge, through a return to myth and fairy tales. Emancipation, thus, goes round in circles. For the sake of truth and reality, truth and reality are renounced: this is the meaning of the “crisis of the grand narratives” of the legitimisation of knowledge. (p. 101)"

"Science does not aim to cover exhaustively the whole of reality, but to construct systems and concepts which will perhaps — and it is a big perhaps — allow man to act on the world."

"To the natural philosopher, to whom the whole extent of nature belongs, all the individual branches of science constitute the links of an endless chain, from which not one can be detached without destroying the harmony of the whole."

"In an enterprise such as the building of the atomic bomb the difference between ideas, hopes, suggestions and theoretical calculations, and solid numbers based on measurement, is paramount. All the committees, the politicking and the plans would have come to naught if a few unpredictable nuclear cross sections had been different from what they are by a factor of two."

"I remember having listened to Fermi’s discussions on hydrodynamics with von Neumann. (These took the strange form of competitions before Fermi’s office blackboard as each tried to solve the problem under study first; von Neumann, with his unmatched lightning-fast analytical skill, usually won)."

"In scientific matters there was a common language and one standard of values; in moral and political problems there were many....Furthermore, in science there is a court of last resort, experiment, which is unavailable in human affairs."