Kartik > Kartik's Quotes

“Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons? After all, the economies of Europe, the United States, and Israel depend hugely on their weapons industry. It’s the one thing they haven’t outsourced to China.”
― Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction

“In the lane behind my house, every night I walk past road gangs of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber-optic cables to speed up our digital revolution. In the bitter winter cold, they work by the light of a few candles.
It’s as though the people of India have been rounded up and loaded onto two convoys of trucks (a huge big one and a tiny little one) that have set off resolutely in opposite directions. The tiny convoy is on its way to a glittering destination somewhere near the top of the world. The other convoy just melts into the darkness and disappears.”
― Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction

“It was in this last job that Osman formed most of his convictions about his fellow human beings. No one should try to philosophize on the nature of humanity until they had worked in a public toilet for a couple of weeks and seen the things that people did, simply because they could – destroying the water hose on the wall, breaking the door handle, drawing nasty graffiti everywhere, peeing on the hand towels, depositing every kind of filth and muck all over the place, knowing that someone else would have to clean it up.”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

“They remained like that, lying side by side, gazing at each other and marveling at the small miracle of two lives having crossed, two souls having found each other in this vast world.”
― Amélie Wen Zhao, Song of Silver, Flame Like Night

“I wish for you to not go anywhere without me. In this world and the next. I wish for you to choose me.”
― Amélie Wen Zhao, Song of Silver, Flame Like Night

“I do not believe ambitious men who say the only route to peace and prosperity lies in giving them more power—particularly when they do it with lands and people who are not theirs.”
― S.A. Chakraborty, The Empire of Gold

“Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India – the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls, and intellectuals.”
― Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-fiction

“It must be nice, possessing all the power, so that you could approach geopolitics like a chess game, popping in curiously to observe which countries deserved your aid and which didn’t.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

“But at that point, he had little reason to believe that Soviet citizens- long hardened to news of misfortune and distrustful of official information- would really lose their heads if warned of an accident; more urgent was the state's compulsion for secrecy.”
― Adam Higginbotham, Chernobyl History of a Tragedy By Serhii Plokhy & Midnight in Chernobyl By Adam Higginbotham 2 Books Collection Set

“According to opinion polls, we’re expected to believe that there’s a national consensus on the issue. It’s official now. Everybody loves the bomb. (Therefore the bomb is good.) Is it possible for a man who cannot write his own name to understand even the basic, elementary facts about the nature of nuclear weapons? Has anybody told him that nuclear war has nothing at all to do with his received notions of war? Nothing to do with honor, nothing to do with pride? Has anybody bothered to explain to him about thermal blasts, radioactive fallout, and the nuclear winter? Are there even words in his language to describe the concepts of enriched uranium, fissile material, and critical mass? Or has his language itself become obsolete? Is he trapped in a time capsule, watching the world pass him by, unable to understand or communicate with it because his language never took into account the horrors that the human race would dream up? Who the hell conducted those opinion polls? Who the hell is the prime minister to decide whose finger will be on the nuclear button that could turn everything we love—our earth, our skies, our mountains, our plains, our rivers, our cities and villages—to ash in an instant? Who the hell is he to reassure us that there will be no accidents? How does he know? Why should we trust him? What has he ever done to make us trust him? What have any of them ever done to make us trust them?”
― Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction

“For all the endless empty chatter about democracy, today the world is run by three of the most secretive institutions in the world: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, all three of which, in turn, are dominated by the United States. Their decisions are made in secret. The people who head them are appointed behind closed doors. Nobody really knows anything about them, their politics, their beliefs, their intentions. Nobody elected them. Nobody said they could make decisions on our behalf. A world run by a handful of greedy bankers and CEOs whom nobody elected can’t possibly last.”
― Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction

“I do what needs to be done."
"Everyone says that so easily, yet everybody seems to have a different opinion of what 'needs' to be done.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages

“The jeering, hooting young men who battered down the Babri Masjid are the same ones whose pictures appeared in the papers in the days that followed the nuclear tests. They were on the streets, celebrating India’s nuclear bomb and simultaneously “condemning Western Culture” by emptying crates of Coke and Pepsi into public drains. I’m a little baffled by their logic: Coke is Western Culture, but the nuclear bomb is an old Indian tradition? Yes, I’ve heard—the bomb is in the Vedas. It might be, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find Coke in the Vedas, too. That’s the great thing about all religious texts. You can find anything you want in them—as long as you know what you’re looking for.”
― Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction

“Fascism is also about the slow, steady infiltration of all the instruments of state power. It’s about the slow erosion of civil liberties, about unspectacular day-today injustices. Fighting it means fighting to win back the minds and hearts of people. Fighting it does not mean asking for shakhas and the madrassas that are overtly communal to be banned, it means working toward the day when they’re voluntarily abandoned as bad ideas. It means keeping an eagle eye on public institutions and demanding accountability. It means putting your ear to the ground and listening to the whispering of the truly powerless. It means giving a forum to the myriad voices from the hundreds of resistance movements across the country which are speaking about real things—about bonded labor, marital rape, sexual preferences, women’s wages, uranium dumping, unsustainable mining, weavers’ woes, farmers’ suicides. It means fighting displacement and dispossession and the relentless, everyday violence of abject poverty. Fighting it also means not allowing your newspaper columns and prime-time TV spots to be hijacked by their spurious passions and their staged theatrics, which are designed to divert attention from everything else.”
― Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction

“If you rule by violence, you should expect to be removed by violence.”
― S.A. Chakraborty, The Empire of Gold

“I think given the choice between loving Mare - betrayal included - and never knowing her, I'd chose love. I risked, and I lost, but the risk was still worth it.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire

“It was a truth universally acknowledged that any young lady without a dragon was doomed to social failure.”
― Stephanie Burgis, Scales and Sensibility

“We dismissed Nathan as being driven by the same pecuniary motive people falsely assigned to us, and for partly the same reason: to avoid facing an uncomfortable truth, a blurring of the line between the good guys and the bad. So we called the truth a lie and rewrote history as though it were in our power to dictate reality so long as it was in the church’s judgment and interest. So long as we all held the line, no one could prevail against us.”
― Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope

“I would never wait two minutes in a store without looking at my phone or reading a book. The idea of not filling every minute with stimulation panicked me, and I found it weird when I saw other people not doing it. On long train or bus journeys, whenever I would see somebody just sit there for six hours, doing nothing but stare out of the window, I would feel an urge to lean over to them and say, “I’m sorry to disturb you. It’s none of my business, but I just wanted to check— you do realize that you have a limited amount of time in which to be alive, and the clock counting down toward death is constantly ticking, and you’ll never get back these six hours you are spending doing nothing at all? And when you are dead, you’ll be dead forever? You know that, right?”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“I would have come for you. And if I couldn't walk, I'd crawl to you, and no matter how broken we were, we'd fight our way out together-knives drawn, pistols blazing. Because that's what we do. We never stop fighting.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“Did I miss anything good?”
― Danielle Valentine, How to Survive Your Murder

“That's just what translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“No, I wasn't afraid. I was tired." Ali's voice broke on the word. "I'm tired of everyone in this city feeding on vengeance. I'm tired of teaching our children to hate and fear other children because their parents are our enemies. And I'm sick and tired of acting like the only way to save our people is to cut down all who might oppose us, as if our enemies won't return the favor the instant power shifts.”
― S.A. Chakraborty, The Kingdom of Copper

“The cruelty could not register for her. Bloodlust, she understood. Bloodlust, she was guilty of. She had lost herself in battle, too; she had gone further than she should have, she had hurt others when she should have stopped. But this—viciousness on this scale, wanton slaughter of this magnitude, against innocents who hadn’t even lifted a finger in self-defense, this she could not imagine doing. They surrendered, she wanted to scream at her disappeared enemy. They dropped their weapons. They posed no threat to you. Why did you have to do this? A rational explanation eluded her. Because the answer could not be rational. It was not founded in military strategy. It was not because of a shortage of food rations, or because of the risk of insurgency or backlash. It was, simply, what happened when one race decided that the other was insignificant. The Federation had massacred Golyn Niis for the simple reason that they did not think of the Nikara as human. And if your opponent was not human, if your opponent was a cockroach, what did it matter how many of them you killed? What was the difference between crushing an ant and setting an anthill on fire? Why shouldn’t you pull wings off insects for your own enjoyment? The bug might feel pain, but what did that matter to you? If you were the victim, what could you say to make your tormentor recognize you as human? How did you get your enemy to recognize you at all? And why should an oppressor care?”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Real equality for men and women needs a men’s movement to sweep away the gender roles that we continue to impose on men even as we struggle to remove them from women.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy.”
― Charlaine Harris

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Children ceased to be children when you put a sword in their hands. When you taught them to fight a war, then you armed them and put them on the front lines, they were not children anymore. They were soldiers.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“War doesn't determine who's right. War determines who remains.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“If you’re asleep, you’re not spending money, so you’re not consuming anything. You’re not producing any products.” He explained that “during the last recession [in 2008]…they talked about global output going down by so many percent, and consumption going down. But if everybody were to spend [an] extra hour sleeping [as they did in the past], they wouldn’t be on Amazon. They wouldn’t be buying things.” If we went back to sleeping a healthy amount—if everyone did what I did in Provincetown—Charles said, “it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people. The attentional failures are just roadkill. That’s just the cost of doing business.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again