Rakesh > Rakesh's Quotes

“What do you think gay people do? Have done for generations? We adopt a safe version of ourselves for the public, for protection, and then as adults we excavate our true selves from the parts we’ve invented to protect us. It’s the most important work of queer lives.”
― Steven Rowley, The Guncle

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Democracy is not merely a form of Government...It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellowmen.”
― B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste

“Caste system is the most brilliantly administered scam in history.”
― Narendra Jadhav, Untouchables: My Family's Triumphant Journey Out of the Caste System in Modern India

“Until we get equality in education, we won't have an equal society.”
― Sonia Sotomayor

“One of the more difficult questions I used to find myself being asked as a United Nations official, especially when I had been addressing a generalist audience, was: What is the single most important thing that can be done to improve the world?...

If I had to pick one thing we must do above all else, I now offer a two-word mantra: "Educate girls.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India, the Emerging 21st-Century Power

“I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.”
― Bhim Rao Ambedkar

“So my students sometimes say: “Everything you teach about religion you seem to like. You always say such positive things about Islam and such positive things about Judaism and Hinduism, which one do you believe?” And I say: “Which one do you think God believes?” [laughter] What the students say is true. I like all religions and I think religion is a natural expression of the higher aspirations of humanity just as it all too often is also an expression of the despotic and most base aspects of humanity.”
― Mark Juergensmeyer

“For a successful revolution it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.”
― Bhim Rao Ambedkar

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.”
― David Bohm

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith

“Freedom of mind is the real freedom.
A person whose mind is not free though he may not be in chains, is a slave, not a free man.
One whose mind is not free, though he may not be in prison, is a prisoner and not a free man.
One whose mind is not free though alive, is no better than dead.
Freedom of mind is the proof of one's existence.”
― Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Writings And Speeches: A Ready Reference Manual

“In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.”
― Kevin Alan Lee, The Split Mind: Schizophrenia from an Insider's Point of View

“Corruption is power that overflows its bounds. By definition, it rarely stays contained in a single location.”
― Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

“Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life—or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“I've never understood America,"said the king.
"Neither do we, sir. You might say we have two governments, kind of overlapping. First we have the elected government. It's Democratic or Republican, doesn't make much difference, and then there's corporation government."
"They get along together, these governments?"
"Sometimes," said Tod. "I don't understand it myself. You see, the elected government pretends to be democratic, and actually it is autocratic. The corporation governments pretend to be autocratic and they're all the time accusing the others of socialism. They hate socialism."
"So I have heard," said Pippin.
"Well, here's the funny thing, sir. You take a big corporation in America, say like General Motors or Du Pont or U.S. Steel. The thing they're most afraid of is socialism, and at the same time they themselves are socialist states."
The king sat bolt upright. "Please?" he said.
"Well, just look at it, sir. They've got medical care for employees and their families and accident insurance and retirement pensions, paid vacations -- even vacation places -- and they're beginning to get guaranteed pay over the year. The employees have representation in pretty nearly everything, even the color they paint the factories. As a matter of fact, they've got socialism that makes the USSR look silly. Our corporations make the U.S. Government seem like an absolute monarchy. Why, if the U.S. government tried to do one-tenth of what General Motors does, General Motors would go into armed revolt. It's what you might call a paradox sir.”
― John Steinbeck, The Short Reign of Pippin IV

“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there.

You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.

Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“I am increasingly convinced that the moral intellectual task of our age is to fight against the terrible normalisation and even celebration of stupidity.”
― Anagha Ingole

“The function of democratic living is not to lower standards but to raise those that have been too low.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, Tomorrow Is Now

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“If we were to define a sleeping bag as a house, India would move swiftly towards ending her housing shortage. A shortage of nearly thirty-one million units. Accept this definition, and you could go in for mass production of sleeping bags. We could then have passionate debates about the drastic reduction in the magnitude of the housing problem. The cover stories could run headlines: ‘Is it for real?’ And straps: ‘Sounds too good to be true, but it is.’ The government could boast that it had not only stepped up production of sleeping bags but had piled up an all-time record surplus of them. Say, thirty-seven million. Conservatives could argue that we were doing so well, the time had come to export sleeping bags, at ‘world prices’. The bleeding hearts could moan that sleeping bags had not reached the poorest. Investigative muckrakers could scrutinise the contracts given to manufacturers. Were the bags overpriced? Were they of good quality? That ends the housing shortage. There’s only one problem. Those without houses at the start of the programme will still be without houses at the end of it. (True, some of them will have sleeping bags, probably at world prices.)”
― P Sainath, Everybody loves a good drought

“The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.”
― Joseph Joubert

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”
― Gustav Mahler

“If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity,”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“Our self is not constructed by claiming one side of a duality. Rather we are fashioned as drops of water, of the same abundant substance as the ocean. We have within our small selves all the properties, all the constitutive molecules that make up the limitless whole. We are the many, held in the one. We are fractal images of the ultimate reality.

If we embraced this wholeness within ourselves, perhaps we would be less anxious as men about the feminine within, less anxious as heterosexuals about our (perhaps unexplored) capacity to love someone of the same sex, less anxious as Hindus about the evidence of Muslim culture in our lives, less anxious as ‘upper castes’ about the breaching of our spaces by the “lower”, and generally speaking less anxious as “us” about the lurking presence of “them” in us. We could relax into our porosity. We would no longer need to feel small, threatened and in constant need of securing our borders, rallying our defences against being overwhelmed by the “Other”.”
― Shabnam Virmani, Burn Down Your House: Provocations From Kabir

“When you have everything, the only luxury left is taking things away from others.”
― Kirsten Miller, Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books

“Once Jesus arrived on the scene, all those Old Testament laws no longer applied. The New Testament tells us we’re supposed to follow Christ, not the old ways. And as far as I know, Jesus never said a damn thing about gay folks or barbecue. But he sure did talk a lot about love.”
― Kirsten Miller, Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books