Himanshu Rai > Himanshu's Quotes

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“There is an old persian saying. When everyone is looking for a chair to sit on, it is better to sit on the floor.”
― Ahmad Shah Masud

“To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare.”
― Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō

“To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.”
― Robert Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“As one would expect of tourists, they tried to find poverty colourful,”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition

“Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.”
― Criss Jami

“Let your home be you mast and not your anchor.”
― Khalil Gibran

“The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it.”
― Osho

“One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London

“Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. ”
― Jack London, The Star Rover

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose

“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin

“One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.”
― Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

In 1984, Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us".”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention”
― Neil Postman The End of Education

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest - without asking to be paid.”
― Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People

“Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the PRIVACY of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.”
― Dostoyevsky Fyodor

“In great hearts the cruelty of life gives birth to good.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.”
― Vasily Grossman

“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
― Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World

“Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.

In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.”
― Noam Chomsky