MSA > MSA's Quotes

“If you can't go back to your mother's womb, you'd better learn to be a good fighter.”
― Anchee Min, Red Azalea: A Memoir

“Religion is based primarily upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly as the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“It is pretended that, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, it is “we the people” who wrote that document, rather than fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central government. That use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us—rich and poor and middle class—have a common interest.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

“Is there a “national interest” when a few people decide on war, and huge numbers of others—here and abroad—are killed or crippled as a result of such a decision? Should citizens not ask in whose interest are we doing what we are doing? Then why not, I came to think, tell the story of wars not through the eyes of the generals and diplomats but from the viewpoints of the GIs, of the parents who received the black-bordered telegrams, even of “the enemy.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

“I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

“A legacy, especially of a prolonged movement, tends to endure for a long time. But no legacy, however strong and sound, can last forever. It tends to erode and become irrelevant unless it is constantly reinforced and developed and sometimes transcended in a creative manner to suit the changing circumstances.”
― Bipan Chandra, India After Independence: 1947-2000

“One foreign correspondent came up to be friendly. He asked this man what he should think about what Khomeini had said. How seriously should he take it? Was it just a rhetorical flourish or something genuinely dangerous? “Oh, don’t worry too much,” the journalist said. “Khomeini sentences the president of the United States to death every Friday afternoon.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“in recent years, Pakistan has witnessed some of the worst organized violence against religious minorities since Partition. Over an eighteen-month period covering 2012 and part of 2013, at least 200 incidents of sectarian violence were reported; these incidents led to some 1,800 casualties, including more than 700 deaths.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“At the time of partition in 1947, almost 23 per cent of Pakistan’s population (which then included Bangladesh) comprised non-Muslim citizens. The proportion of non-Muslims has since fallen to approximately 3 per cent.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Attacks on religious minorities occur in several Muslim-majority nations, from Egypt to Indonesia, just as they do in Pakistan. But as Pakistan is the first country to declare itself an Islamic republic in modern times,”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Pakistan was not even three years old when its law minister voiced the fear that extremist Muslims would not allow religious diversity. Eventually, Mandal left Pakistan and moved to India,”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Jinnah had chosen a Hindu, Jogendar Nath Mandal, as the country’s first law minister to affirm that secular lawyers and not theologians would run Pakistan’s legal system. But many of his followers could not comprehend this nuanced conception of a state.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“purposes,’ he insisted. In Suhrawardy’s view, the Muslim League government was not making non-Muslims, especially Hindus, feel safe within Pakistan and questioned the government’s claims to the contrary. ‘Why are the Hindus running away from Sindh [if] they were safe and sound, where they had established business on colossal scales and which they made their homes?’ he asked, pointing to the deep cultural ties of Sindhi Hindus to Sindh. According to Suhrawardy, the rhetoric of an Islamic state was responsible for causing insecurity among non-Muslims. ‘The Pakistan State, if it is to be maintained, must be maintained by the goodwill of Pakistanis of all people, Muslims or non-Muslims whom you consider to be your nationals,’ he stressed. The minorities could not depend ‘merely on the goodwill of the Muslims or on their authority or their strength’.48”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“According to Suhrawardy, a religion-based state that did not protect its minorities would be one in which ‘there will be no commerce, no business and no trade’. With remarkable prescience, the Bengali leader warned that ‘those lawless elements that may be turned today against non-Muslims will be turned later on, once those fratricidal tendencies have been aroused, against the Muslim gentry’.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Although many Islamic clerics and theologians participated in the campaign to demand Pakistan’s transformation into an Islamic state, the blueprint for a step-by-step transition was offered by Abul Ala Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), the South Asian analogue of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood. Maududi, joined by Mufti Shabbir Ahmed Usmani, a cleric elected to the Constituent Assembly on the Muslim League platform, called for the future constitution of Pakistan to be based on the underlying assumption that sovereignty rested with Allah and that the state’s function was solely to administer the country in accordance with God’s will. Both Islamic scholars also insisted that only the ulema (those trained in Islamic theology) could interpret the laws of Allah.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Liaquat and his westernized colleagues thought they had given Islamists what they wanted. But for Maududi and his fellow Islamists, the Objectives Resolution marked the beginning of a process of cleansing non-Muslim influences from Pakistani State and society. In one of his writings, Maududi had argued that non-Muslim culture had a negative impact on Muslim life. ‘It destroys its inner vitality, blurs its vision, befogs its critical faculties, breeds inferiority complexes, and gradually but assuredly saps all the springs of culture and sounds its death-knell,’ he wrote. He argued that, ‘the Holy Prophet has positively and forcefully forbidden the Muslims to assume the culture and mode of life of the non-Muslims’.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Once the Ahmadis were officially declared non-Muslim in 1974, a new campaign started with the intent to subject the Shias to similar proscriptions.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“When asked whether they were bothered by the prospect of mistreatment of Muslims in countries where they lived as minorities, the ulema were surprisingly callous in their responses. Ataullah Shah Bukhari said that it was not possible for a Muslim to be a faithful citizen of a non-Muslim government. Others, including Maulana Abul Hasanat and Maulana Maududi said that they would have no objection to Muslims in India being subjected to Hindu law or Muslims in non-Muslim countries in general being discriminated against. Most of the ulema seemed to believe that Pakistan was somehow the reincarnation of the seventh-century caliphate and that other countries should be viewed as the caliphs (khalifa) looked upon non-Muslim empires of the time.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“East Pakistan had voted for secular parties, and in West Pakistan too, the Munir Commission report had laid out any number of grounds that could be used to advocate such a course. But the national security establishment preferred to align with West Pakistani Muslim League politicians in persisting with the notion of an Islamic state.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, from Bengal, who served as prime minister for a brief period under the 1956 Constitution, warned against the preoccupation with ‘segregation of our voters into religious communities’ and the emphasis on Pakistan’s destiny as an ideological state. This, he said, ‘would keep alive within Pakistan the divisive communal emotions by which the subcontinent was riven before the achievement of Independence’. He proposed instead that Pakistanis start seeing Pakistan ‘in terms of a nation state’. Suhrawardy saw ‘a Pakistan great enough and strong enough to encompass all of its citizens, whatever their faith, on a basis of true civic equality and by that fact made greater and stronger’.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Ayub saw Hinduism and communism as equal threats to Pakistan. In 1959, he wrote in the foreword of a book The Ideology of Pakistan and Its Implementation that one of the questions of concern for Pakistanis was ‘how can the offensive of Hinduism and Communism against the ideology of Islam be combated?’30 In his autobiography, which was published towards the end of his regime in 1968, Ayub made clear his low regard for Hindus and bluntly expressed his steadfast views on why they could not be friends of Pakistan.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“The space for secular ideas in Pakistan shrank further with the 1965 war and the state-sponsored propaganda of that era. ‘The war brought out a striking characteristic of Pakistan’s political culture,’ observed Khalid bin Sayeed, writing soon after the 1965 India–Pakistan war.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Throughout the war there were widespread rumours of Pakistan’s Hindus and Christians operating as spies or facilitators for the invading army. In some instances, Muslim neighbours engaged in vigilante violence against their non-Muslim compatriots. Even after the war was over, Hindus were described in movies, television plays and patriotic songs as enemies of Islam and Pakistan, while Christians were portrayed as instruments of Western imperialists.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“The army’s attitude towards Hindus was summarized by the New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, in a report from the town of Faridpur, published on 29 June 1971 titled ‘Hindus are Targets of Army Terror in an East Pakistani Town’.38 ‘The Pakistani Army has painted big yellow “H’s” on the Hindu shops still standing in this town to identify the property of the minority eighth of the population that it has made its special targets,”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“When Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate, the physicist Dr Abdus Salam – an Ahmadi – visited the country, his lecture at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad was picketed by Islamic fundamentalists. As the New York Times reported, the protestors’ objections were ‘not directed at Dr Salem’s research but at the religious beliefs of the small community into which he was born’.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“As ally and benefactor, Washington turned a blind eye to Zia’s domestic politics and his pursuit of nuclear weapons for Pakistan. Pakistan’s religious minorities suffered without much protest in the world’s capitals, where Zia was feted as a frontline ally against Soviet expansion. But it is unclear how much influence international protest might have had in diminishing the effects of Zia’s bigotry in any event. Given his stranglehold on power in Pakistan and the geo-political climate of the era, international pressure against Zia’s treatment of the country’s minorities would have been confined to moral appeals and petitions for human rights. And these would have fallen on deaf ears, for Zia’s prejudices were deeply ingrained. Upon being told that his ordinances against Ahmadis had violated global human rights norms, Zia expressed his views toward such matters in a characteristically trenchant manner: ‘Ahmadis offend me because they consider themselves Muslim … Ordinance XX may violate human rights but I don’t care.’80”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Two dollars is less than the cost of a gallon of gas, roughly equivalent to that of a half gallon of milk. Many Americans have spent more than that before they get to work or school in the morning. Yet in 2011, more than 4 percent of all households with children in the world’s wealthiest nation were living in a poverty so deep that most Americans don’t believe it even exists in this country.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Had the Ellwood plan passed, perhaps her downward spiral into $2-a-day poverty, and her repeated spells of homelessness, could have been avoided. No one will ever know for sure.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“In the early 2000s, researchers in Chicago and Boston mailed out fake résumés to hundreds of employers, varying only the names of the applicants, but choosing names that would be seen as identifiably black or white. Strikingly, “Emily” and “Brendan” were 50 percent more likely to get called for an interview than “Lakisha” and “Jamal.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

“Even the researcher was surprised by what she found: the white applicant with a felony conviction was more likely to get a positive response from a prospective employer than the black applicant with no criminal record. When the study was replicated in New York City a few years later, she and her colleagues saw similar results for Latino applicants relative to whites.”
― Kathryn Edin, $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America