Shakeeb Yousaf > Shakeeb's Quotes

“For great men, religion is a way of making friends; small people make religion a fighting tool.”
― APJ Abdul Kalam, Ignited Minds: Unleashing the Power Within India

“Thinking is the capital, Enterprise is the way, Hard Work is the solution”
― A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Ignited Minds: Unleashing the Power Within India

“The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”
― Charles Darwin

“In times of war, you often hear leaders—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—saying, ‘God is on our side.’ But that isn’t true. In war, God is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans.”
― Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time

“we don’t realize how many of our fixed views of the world are based on limited samples of reality.”
― Bernard Roth, The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The necessary consequence of man's right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

If some "pacifist" society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.”
― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

“Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“No one is really going to help you or give you direction. In fact, the odds are against you.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“The five basic tenets of Islam continue onto the sixth for me. Huquq-ul-Ibaad, or humanitarianism. That it is not proclaimed as obligatory has deeper meaning; as right or wrong are left to human initiatives, its importance would be lost if forced."
-Edhi, A Mirror To The Blind”
― Tehmina Durrani, Edhi: A Mirror To The Blind

“Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:
Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for he says, 'Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah' (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the disbelief of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.”
― Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

“In many ways you can say that the prison serves as an institution that consolidates the state’s inability and refusal to address the most pressing social problems of this era.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

“An idea is like a play. It needs a good producer and a good promoter even if it is a masterpiece. Otherwise the play may never open; or it may open but, for a lack of an audience, close after a week. Similarly, an idea will not move from the fringes to the mainstream simply because it is good; it must be skillfully marketed before it will actually shift people's perceptions and behavior.”
― David Bornstein, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas

“Poverty is not only a lack of money, it's a lack of sense of meaning.”
― David Bornstein, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas

“No one must ever let power or social, economic, or political interest turn him or her away from other human beings, from the attention they deserve and the respect they are entitled to. nothing must ever lead to a person to compromise this principle or faith in favor of a political strategy aimed at saving or protecting a community from some peril. The freely offered, sincere heart of a poor, powerless individual is worth a thousand times more in the sight of God than the assiduously courted, self-interested heart of a rich one.”
― Tariq Ramadan, The Messenger: The Meanings of the Life of Muhammad

“We don’t need to actually solve the problems of the poor, the dalits, the downtrodden. Give them education and they will become self-confident. They will solve their own problems. So ‘education’ is actually the solution to all problems!”
― Rashmi Bansal, I have a Dream

“If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”
― Steve Jobs

“Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature.”
― Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

“Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.”
― Wade Davis, Light at the Edge of the World

“A good change leader never thinks, “Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people.” A change leader thinks, “How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?”
― Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“We spend too much time trying to be “good” when good is often merely average. To be great we must be different. And that doesn’t come from trying to follow society’s vision of what is best, because society doesn’t always know what it needs. More often being the best means just being the best version of you.”
― Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

“Champions aren't made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them-a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have the skill, and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.”
― Muhammad Ali

“The ideal organizational environment encourages everyone to observe, collect data, and speak up.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

“Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar

“In a time of social fragmentation, vulgarity becomes a way of life. To be shocking becomes more important - and often more profitable - than to be civil or creative or truly original.”
― Al Gore

“The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Christopher McCandless

“Watching the infinite horizons gives you infinite dreams, infinite ideas, infinite paths! Choose a great target and then you will see that great instruments will appear for you to reach that target!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan