Ankit > Ankit's Quotes

“Atticus, he was real nice."

"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours—arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don't you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“The universe doesn't allow perfection.”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“Only time(whatever that may be) will tell.”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“Today will still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“There should be no boundary to human endeavor.”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

“A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

“Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.” Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“Every passion or wicked thought, every affliction or crime, every rebellion or catastrophe necessarily casts its shadow before it long before it manifests itself in real life.”
― Ismail Kadare, The Palace Of Dreams

“Who can say it’s not what we see with our eyes open that is distorted, and that what’s described here isn’t the true essence of things?” He slowed down outside a door. “Haven’t you ever heard old men sigh that life’s a dream?”
― Ismail Kadaré, The Palace Of Dreams

“Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.”
― Graham Greene , The Power and the Glory

“Never organize a media interaction without deciding what headline you want to come out of it!”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“One of his favourite couplets, by the poet Muzaffar Razmi, which he quoted on more than one occasion, in Parliament and to Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, was: ‘Ye jabr bhi dekha hai, taareeq ki nazron ne / Lamhon ne khata ki thi, sadiyon ne saza payi’ (Much injustice / has been seen in the saga of history / When for a mistake made in a moment we are punished for centuries).”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“I dream of a day when, while retaining our respective national identities, one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul. That is how my forefathers lived. That is how I want our grandchildren to live.’ Manmohan Singh, FICCI annual general meeting
8 January 2007”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. ”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals