Critics

"Allah loves those who worship Him to become shaheeds, whose blood is spilled out of love for Him."

"In August 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Iraqi from Samarra, sent a scouting mission of seven or eight men from Iraq into Syria to assess how ripe the country was for his ambitions. Baghdadi was taking Zarqawi’s dream of establishing an Islamic state to another level. His men found a country much like Iraq in the years after the US invasion: outside the large cities, men with guns roamed freely, state institutions were weak, and—most conveniently—Assad had released scores of Islamists from his jails, just as Saddam Hussein had done before the US invasion of 2003. This was a classic move: the dictator appears to show magnanimity at a time of unrest and declares an amnesty for prisoners, but alongside the intellectuals and activists, he releases into the wild those who will inflict chaos, so he can be called upon as the best option to bring peace. In Syria, some of the men released had fought in Iraq, groomed by Assad himself to make life miserable for the Americans in Iraq. Assad would jail the fighters as soon as they returned, letting them rot in prison until he next needed them. As he set them loose in 2011, he deviously warned the international community that the protesters were religious extremists, making him the architect of his own self-fulfilling prophecy. Baghdadi’s men traveled west from Iraq into Syria, on desert highways and along rivers, a well-traveled road used by fighters who had gone in the opposite direction to join the insurgency in Iraq. In Syria, courtesy of Assad, they found a ready network of Salafist jihadists they could tap into to serve Baghdadi’s grand designs of a borderless Islamic state. But without a revolution for freedom, there would have been no such opportunity."

"...I bear witness by God - and there is no other deity except Him - to what I know from familiarity with this imposter who has called himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as he had studied under me with a group of the erudite ones...in the year 2005, then the study was cut off because of my arrest, and I had got to know him very well. He was of limited intelligence, slow to understand, pale in intuitive grasp. For he is not from among the average students of Islamic knowledge ['ilm], and his studies background are academic studies in the government universities, whose standard is emaciated and which have no relation with forming a student of knowledge, let alone a knowledgeable person [referring to Baghdadi's time at the Islamic University of Baghdad]."

"...We have endured a lot of harm from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his brothers, and we preferred to respond with as little as possible, out of our concern to extinguish the fire of sedition. But Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his brothers did not leave us a choice, for they have demanded that all the mujahideen reject their confirmed pledges of allegiance, and to pledge allegiance to them for what they claim of a caliphate..."

"...So, is “Caliph Ibrahim” of the Islamic State an extremist, a militant, a terrorist or an Islamic fighter? None of the above. All those labels imply behavior that makes some sort of sense in terms of human reality and normal ideologies..."

"Once data are ruled out as arbiters among theories, those theories become pointless, just another clever intellectual game."

"It should be clear by now that there are people who can, in fact, be reasonably considered experts; that it is rational to rely, within limits, on expert opinion; and that it is possible, by exercising relatively simple criteria, to gain insight into whether a particular expert is reliable or not. It is also true that experts, of course, do make mistakes, and that even the agreement of a large majority of experts in a field does not guarantee that they got it right. That’s the nature of scientific truth, as we have seen throughout this book: it is tentative, because it is the result of a human endeavor that is limited both by the type and amount of available evidence and by humans’ finite mental powers and emotional reactions. But the examples above show how you can, with a little bit of practice, tell science from bunk!"

"Inspired by neo-Vedanta, Kuvempu considered the Vedas and Upanishads as India’s common spiritual heritage, not texts of Brahminical orthodoxy. A famous poem of Kuvempu, "Aniketana", asks that our consciousness not be bounded by the identities of caste, religion, gender, and even language, since they lessen our experience in the world. He wished that we aspire to become vishvamanava (universal human)."

"It was a day of blackest deed When Delhi streets of fame Did glitter well by cursed greed Of harsh Timoor the lame."

"Kuvempu never visited temples, but believed in the presence of creator in each creature. In fact, whenever Kuvempu was not writing or teaching, he meditated. To him, worshipping nature was a path to attain Aadhyatma or The Supreme Soul."

"Amidst the early morning dew Walking across the greenery And in the evening that is scary While taking a breath, Oh, flower, I listen to your song, Oh flower, I defeat your love."

"In me is the sky, in me lies the earth."

"When Manmatha kissed Rati, blood from her lips may have spilt on earth and blossomed into rose on the plant and kisses the viewer's eyes with its beauty now!"

"Many don't know Kuvempu wrote poems in English as early as 1922, bringing out a collection of seven poems titled Beginner's muse! In 1924, when Kuvempu got introduced to the Irish poet James Cousins through Dr M H Krishnamachar, he suggested to Kuvempu that he should write only in Kannada. Though he was initially disheartened by Cousin's advice, he later realised his full potential as a poet and a multi-faceted writer in the richness of Kannada."

"Be unhoused, O my soul! Only the Infinite be your goal. Leave those myriad forms behind, Leave the million names that bind. A flash will pierce your heart and mind, And unhouse you, O my soul!"

"It is not correct to say that Valmiki is the only Ramayana poet. There are thousands of Ramayana poets. There is a Ramayana poet in every village."

"Winnow the chaff of a hundred creeds Beyond these systems, hollow as reeds, Turn unhorizened to where Truth leads, To be unhoused, O my soul!"

"Victory to you Mother Karnataka, The daughter of Mother India! Hail the land of beautiful rivers and forests! Hail the abode of saints and seers!"

"When I hear Kannada, my heart leaps up and I am all ears."

"A new jewel in the crown of Goddess Earth, You are a trove of sandalwood, beauty and gold. Victory to you Mother Karnataka, the daughter of Mother India, where Rama and Krishna had their incarnations."

"The infinite Yoga knows no end, Endless the quest you apprehend. You'll grow infinite and ascend, When you are unhoused, O my soul!"

"Garden of peace for all communities, A sight that allures the connoisseurs, A garden where Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Parsis and the Jains (can grow together); The site where many kings like Janaka ruled; A haven for singers and musicians; The body of the children of Mother Kannada; The house where the Kannada Tongue plays in joy."

"Every child, at birth, is the Universal Man. But, as it grows, we turn it into "a petty man." It should be the function of education to turn it again into the original "Universal Man." The child which by birth was the universal man is fettered by us with such constraints as country, language, religion, caste, race and colour. To free it from all these limitations and transform it into "the enlightened soul", that is to say, the universal man, — this should become the first and foremost function of our education, culture, civilization, and what not."

"The decisive gestures in life are almost always the simplest, the most ingenuous."

"Making mental sermons, can spoil delicious moments."

"Sex is an absinthe whose strength only the strong can stand. In both sexes there are two successive crises, the sexual and the sensual. The first comes at a fixed period … the second generally coincides with the completion of growth. Sometimes, when decline is beginning, a third occurs, which like the first brings with it a condition of sentimentality."

"Women feel and it suffices to steer them satisfactorily through life as well as to solve problems which leave men utterly helpless. It is only through feelings one can get in contact with them. There is but one way of understanding women and that is to love them."

"Women don't understand themselves and what is more they do not care about understanding."

"Women live entirely in the present, men much more in the future where nature is less well organized."

"Art must break the chains, all rules and formulas."

"Innocence has its instincts, its needs, its physiological dues."

"Time does not live for them, they (girls) live in the absolute. A curious creature. But then all women are curious creatures, girls above all."

"Grace from on high so opportunely purifies the petty human passions."

"Women are complex, of course not more so than men, but in a different way that men cannot understand."

"All poetry is an affair of the body, that is, to be real, it must affect the body."

"We write as we feel, as we think, with our entire body."

"Literary style is the product of the toal phyisology."

"Der Fremde ist uns nah, insofern wir Gleichheiten nationaler oder sozialer, berufsmäßiger oder allgemein menschlicher Art zwischen ihm und uns fühlen; er ist uns fern, insofern diese Gleichheiten über ihn und uns hinausreichen und uns beide nur verbinden, weil sie überhaupt sehr Viele verbinden."

"Objectivity may also be defined as freedom: the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given."

"Man's position in the world is defined by the fact that in every dimension of his being and behavior he finds himself at every moment between two boundaries. This condition appears as the formal structure of our existence, filled always with different contents in life's diverse provinces, activities, and destinies. We feel that the content and value of every hour stands between a higher and a lower; every thought between a wiser and a more foolish; every possession between a more extended and a more limited; every deed between a greater and a lesser measure of meaning, adequacy, and morality."

"If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the "stranger" presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics."

"In the presence of the total reality upon which our conduct is founded, our knowledge is characterized by peculiar limitations and aberrations. We cannot say in principle that "error is life and knowledge is death," because a being involved in persistent errors would continually act wide of the purpose, and would thus inevitably perish."

"Objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement."

"Man is something that is to be overcome. Logically considered, this, too, presents a contradiction: he who overcomes himself is admittedly the victor, but he is also the defeated. The ego succumbs to itself, when it wins; it achieves victory, when it suffers defeat. Yet the contradiction only arises when the two aspects of this unity are hardened into opposed, mutually exclusive conceptions. It is precisely the fully unified process of the moral life which overcomes and surpasses every lower state by achieving a higher one, and again transcends this latter state through one still higher. That man overcomes himself means that he reaches out beyond the bounds that the moment sets for him. There must be something at hand to be overcome, but it is only there in order to be overcome. Thus even as an ethical agent, man is the limited being that has no limit."

"One of the first theorists to acknowledge the deep and important impact of urbanization on social life was the German scholar, Georg Simmel. Simmel developed a sociology that focused on the special ways that forms, such as the number of people in groups, influenced social life. His effort to understand the nature of urbanization and, in particular, the metropolis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, displayed his characteristic method of analysis."

"A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country."

"Money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of "how much?" Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the size of the area which they cover."

"Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones."

"Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor. They produce thereby such extreme phenomena as in Paris the remunerative occupation of the quatorzième. They are persons who identify themselves by signs on their residences and who are ready at the dinner hour in correct attire, so that they can be quickly called upon if a dinner party should consist of thirteen persons. In the measure of its expansion, the city offers more and more the decisive conditions of the division of labor. It offers a circle which through its size can absorb a highly diverse variety of services."

"The most profound reason... why the metropolis conduces to the urge for the most individual personal existence... appears to me to be the following: the development of modern culture is characterized by the preponderance of what one may call the "objective spirit" over the "subjective spirit.""