Pulakesh > Pulakesh's Quotes

“nothing that is worth knowing can be taught”
― Oscar Wilde

“Plato was a bore.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Let him who would move the world first move himself.”
― Socrates

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“आओ फिर से दिया जलाएँ
भरी दुपहरी में अंधियारा

सूरज परछाई से हारा
अंतरतम का नेह निचोड़ें

बुझी हुई बाती सुलगाएँ।
आओ फिर से दिया जलाएँ

हम पड़ाव को समझे मंज़िल
लक्ष्य हुआ आंखों से ओझल

वतर्मान के मोहजाल में
आने वाला कल न भुलाएँ।

आओ फिर से दिया जलाएँ।

आहुति बाकी यज्ञ अधूरा
अपनों के विघ्नों ने घेरा

अंतिम जय का वज़्र बनाने
नव दधीचि हड्डियां गलाएँ।

आओ फिर से दिया जलाएँ”
― Atal Bihari Vajpayee

“my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

[Preface to Brissot's Address to His Constituents (1794)]”
― Edmund Burke, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform: Speeches and Letters

“The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture”
― Camille Paglia

“Don’t be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid - the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

“The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires character and courage: character because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first. And the statesman must then inspire his people to persist in the endeavor.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”: Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“In any of these evolutions, India will be a fulcrum of twenty-first-century order: an indispensable element, based on its geography, resources, and tradition of sophisticated leadership, in the strategic and ideological evolution of the regions and the concepts of order at whose intersection it stands.”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“Yet a surfeit of information may paradoxically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and push wisdom even further away than it was before. The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”:   Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

“From all the great and indispensable achievements the Internet has brought to our era, its emphasis is on the actual more than the contingent, on the factual rather than the conceptual, on values shaped by consensus rather than by introspection. Knowledge of history and geography is not essential for whose who can evoke their data with the touch of a button. The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook”
― Henry Kissinger, World Order

“The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense.”
― T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

“Another recent event is the almost-instant bankruptcy, in 1998, of a financial investment company (hedge fund) called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), which used the methods and risk expertise of two “Nobel economists,” who were called “geniuses” but were in fact using phony, bell curve–style mathematics while managing to convince themselves that it was great science and thus turning the entire financial establishment into suckers.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Incerto 5-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, Antifragile, Skin in the Game

“The last time the "best and brightest" got control of the country, they dragged it into a protracted, demoralizing war in Southeast Asia, from which the country has still not fully recovered. Yet Reich seems to believe that a new generation of Whiz Kids can do for the faltering American economy what Robert McNamara's generation failed to do for American diplomacy: to restore, through sheer brainpower, the world leadership briefly enjoyed by the United States after World War II and subsequently lost not, of course, through stupidity so much as through the very arrogance the "arrogance of power," as Senator William Fulbright used to call it to which the "best and brightest" are congenitally addicted.
This arrogance should not be confused with the pride characteristic of aristocratic classes, which rests on the inheritance of an ancient lineage and on the obligation to defend its honor. Neither valor and chivalry nor the code of courtly, romantic love, with which these values are closely associated, has any place in the world view of the best and brightest. A meritocracy has no more use for chivalry and valor than a hereditary aristocracy has for brains. Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional or managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts. Even the concept of a republic of letters, which might be expected to appeal to elites with such a large stake in higher education, is almost entirely absent from their frame of reference.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“The “routine acceptance of professionals as a class apart” strikes Kaus as an ominous development. So does their own “smug contempt for the demographically inferior.” Part of the trouble, I would add, is that we have lost our respect for honest manual labor. We think of “creative” work as a series of abstract mental operations performed in an office, preferably with the aid of computers, not as the production of food, shelter, and other necessities. The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life—hence their feeble attempt to compensate by embracing a strenuous regimen of gratuitous exercise.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“The things I do for love.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau