Ashwin > Ashwin's Quotes

“In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.

All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen.

"You cannot enter here," said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. "Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!"

The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.

"Old fool!" he said. "Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!" And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.

Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the city, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of war nor of wizardry, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns, in dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the north wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Their few empty invocations of equality advance no further than the clichés of the French Revolution, and are soon reissued as mathemes by way of shielding them from argument. But when it comes to real politics they write as though negation is enough. Whether it be the Palestinian intifada, the IRA, the Venezuelan Chavistas, the French sans-papiers, or the Occupy movement – whatever the radical cause, it is the attack on the ‘System’ that matters. The alternative is ‘unnameable in the language of the system’. Didn’t Paul Cohen prove the point?”
― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left

“But he did not stop with mouthing phrases. He readily agreed to sign on to the United Nations Democracy Fund launched by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2005, sitting alongside President Bush, and offered Indian professional expertise in conducting elections, and in the use of electronic voting machines developed by India, to countries that sought such assistance. India had rarely identified itself with such democracy-related foreign policy initiatives in the Cold War era for fear of offending many Third-World potentates.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Finding ways to blame victims is psychologically prophylactic for some people because it helps them cope with anxiety induced by uncontrollable environmental threats while maintaining a comforting view that the world will still be fair to them.”
― Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World

“We learned two reasons for the submissiveness of Bushmen. One reason is that it is not in their nature to fight, not in their experience to deal with people other than themselves. They would much rather run, hide, and wait until a menace has passed than defend themselves forcefully, quite unlike the Bantus, who in the past have waged great wars. But Bushmen misunderstand confrontational bravery. The heroes of their legends are little jackals who trick, lie, and narrowly escape, rather than larger, bolder animals such as lions (who in the Kalahari are something of a master race). In the Bushmen’s stories, lions are always being scalded, singed, duped, cuckolded, or killed.”
― Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Harmless People

“So the distinction between people was caused by the great god, and the Bushmen, who want only to be left in peace, do not compete in issues which they cannot win. They are only frightened by other peoples and hope to be spared their attention. Kung Bushmen call all strangers zhu dole, which means “stranger” but, literally, “dangerous person”; they call all non-Bushmen zo si, which means “animals without hooves,” because, they say, non-Bushmen are angry and dangerous like lions and hyenas. But Kung Bushmen call themselves zhu twa si, the harmless people. Twa means “just” or “only,” in the sense that you say: “It was just the wind” or “It is only me.”
― Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Harmless People

“North Vietnam had long played patron to Cambodia’s revolutionaries, often under difficult circumstances. In the early 1950s, in conformity with the strong spirit of the Marxist internationalism that still existed then, Mao encouraged Ho Chi Minh and his cohorts to oversee the creation of Communist parties in Southeast Asia, a task that the North Vietnamese undertook with enthusiasm. The North Vietnamese cadres sent to Cambodia in the 1950s were virtually obliged to start from scratch. As late as 1944, only five hundred Khmer students completed primary school each year, and nationwide there were not more than a thousand secondary school students.”
― Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: how the past helps shape China’s push for global power