Amit Goda > Amit's Quotes

“समाज जीवित रहेगा तभी में जीवित रहूँगा, यह कल्पना ही हमारे मनमे नहीं आती. अपना घर भला और अपन भले, ऐसी हमारी वृति बन गयी है, और ऐसे संकुचित मनके स्वार्थी व्यक्ति को आदर्श कहकर प्रसंशा होती रहती है. ऐसा यह व्यक्ति का विचार पूर्ण रूप से पौछ दो. राष्ट्र और समाज इनके साथ जो एकरूप हो जाता है, वह सच्चा देशसेवक है. अपन अपने बच्चो का पालन पोषण करते है, इन्हे पढते है, परन्तु अपन कभी ऐसा नहीं कहते कि मैंने अपने बच्चो के लिए स्वार्थ त्याग किया, कोई इस प्रकार कहे तो हम उसे स्वीकार करेंगे क्या? इसी प्रकार से राष्ट्र के लिए समाज के लिए कुछ करना यह अपना कर्त्तव्य है, इसमें स्वार्थत्याग कैसा? यह भावना मनमे दृढ होगी ऐसा करें”
― करंदीकर डॉ. वि. रा.

“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
― Plato

“In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”
― Mark Twain

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

{Letter to celebrated scientist Alexander von Humboldt, 6 December, 1813}”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.
It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
― Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte

“I write nothing for publication, and last of all things should it be on the subject of religion. On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Were I to enter on that arena, I should only add an unit to the number of Bedlamites.

[Letter to Mathew Carey, 11 November 1816]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
― Winston Churchill

“Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition.”
― George S. Patton Jr.

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
― Winston S. Churchill, Churchill Speaks: Collected Speeches in Peace and War, 1897-1963

“There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
― Ayn Rand

“I love my country, not my government.”
― Jesse Ventura

“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
― Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome

“A story once went the rounds of Israel to the effect that Ben-Gurion described me as 'the only man' in his cabinet. What amused me about is that he (or whoever invented the story) thought that this was the greatest compliment that could be paid to a woman. I very much doubt that any man would have been flattered if I had said about him that he was the only woman in the government!”
― Golda Meir

“Here's your first problem," he said, pointing at a sentence. "'Religion is the opium of the people.' Well, I don't know about people, but I think you'll find that the opium of pirates is actual opium.”
― Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists

“Don't listen to people telling you that getting up early is best. René Descartes is one of history's most important philosophers, but he rarely got out of bed before noon - and when he started getting up early for a new job as a private tutor, it caused him to catch pneumonia and die.”
― Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! in an Adventure with Communists

“This is our sacred land, Bharat, a land whose glories are sung by the
Gods, a land visualized by Mahayogi Aurobindo as the living manifestation
of the Divine Mother of the universe, the Jaganmaataa, the Aadishakti,
the Mahaamaayaa, the Mahaadurgaa, Who has assumed concrete form to
enable us to see Her and worship Her,...a land worshipped by all our seers and
sages as Maatrubhoomi, Dharmabhoomi, Karmabhoomi and Punybhoomi, a
veritable Devabhoomi and Mokshabhoomi" -”
― Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar

“All the time, circumstances are not going to favor us. We shall have to
face obstacles and adversities. Fearlessness is the first virtue of a hero, the
starting point of all other noble virtues.”
― Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar

“...But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.”
― Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force

“पटेल और नेहरू के बिच हुए पत्र व्यव्हार से भी यह बात स्पष्ट होती है. इस मामले में संघ कि लिप्तता कि जांच का अनुरोध करते हुए प्रधानमंत्री द्वारा लिखे गई पत्र के निस्चययात्मक जवाब में पटेल ने गांधीजी कि हत्या के एक महीने के भीतर २७ फरवरी १९४८ को भेजे पत्र में लिखा- "में लगभग दैनिक आधार पर बापू कि हत्या के मामले में चल रही जांच कि प्रगति पर नज़र रखे हुए हूँ. सभी मुख्य आरोपी अपनी गतिविधियो के बारे में लम्बे और ब्योरेवार विवरण दे चुके थे. इन विवरणों से यह साफ़तोंर पर उभरकर आ जाता है कि संघ का इस मामले में कोई हाथ नहीं था.”
― L.K.Advani

“इसके बावजूद १३ नवंबर १९४८ कि रात को कुख्यात बंगाल स्टेट प्रिजनरस एक्ट के अधीन श्रीगुरुजी को फिर गिरफ्तार कर लिया गया. यह वही एक्ट था, जिसे आज़ादी से पहले नेहरू ने एक "काला कानून" बताया था......... सत्याग्रहियों का मुख्य नारा नेहरू सरकार क्को दी गयी इस चुनौती के रूप में था- 'संघ के खिलाफ आरोप सिद्ध करो या प्रतिबन्ध हटाओ।”
― L.K.Advani

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

“The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …”
― George Orwell

“The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let it go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard-done by person. You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon.
It is also insane.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment