Burak > Burak's Quotes

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
― Horace Mann

“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
― John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife

“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan

“Everything we see in the world is the creative work of women.”
― Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: First President and Founder of the Turkish Republic

“Heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives! You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”
― Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

“Omitte mirari beatæ Fumum et opes strepitumque Romæ. ("Cease to admire the smoke, wealth, and noise of prosperous Rome.")”
― Horace, The Odes of Horace

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
― Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

“For I am not everlasting, but a human being, a part of the whole as an hour is a part of the day. Like an hour I must come, and like an hour pass away.”
― Epictetus, Discourses, Fragments, Handbook

“Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow — A Full-Color Look at the Future of Humankind

“The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”
― Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings

“.. then we come upon a single sentence, or an isolated phrase, and the mask of ceremonial vanishes to expose the familiar poignancy of man’s quest for immortality, with all its uncertainty and its aching desire. “No one has returned from there to tell us how they fare.”

The lament for a dead child, the demand for justice, the lover’s yearning for his beloved—before our recognition of the universality of human emotion, time and distance shrink, the barriers of language, color, and nationality go down; we look into the mind of a man three millennia dead and call him “brother.”
― Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt

“In his memoirs, Celal Bey recalled what it felt like to witness what were, in effect, death marches. “I was like a person sitting beside a river,” he wrote, but “with no means of rescuing anyone from it”:

Instead of water, blood was flowing down the river. Thousands of innocent children, blameless old men, helpless women and strong youngsters were streaming downriver towards oblivion, straight to dust and ashes. Anyone I could hold onto with my bare hands, with my fingernails, I saved. The rest, I believe, went down the river, never to return.”
― Benny Morris, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924