Prajna > Prajna's Quotes

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”
― Malcolm X

“El pasado duele solo si dejamos que nos alcance”
― Mark Millar, Wolverine: Old Man Logan

“Though, I was born a Hindu, I solemnly assure you that I will not die as a Hindu”
― B.R. Ambedkar, Writings And Speeches: A Ready Reference Manual

“Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”
― Isaac Asimov

“The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion”
― Karl Marx

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”
― Frederick Douglass

“It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.”
― Stephen Hawking

“When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”
― Stephen Hawking

“The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.”
― Mark Twain

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
― Mark Twain

“Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.”
― Mark Twain

“It is asked whether, in fact, the leader makes propaganda, or whether propaganda makes the leader. There is a widespread impression that a good press agent can puff up a nobody into a great man.
The answer is the same as that made to the old query as to whether the newspaper makes public opinion or whether public opinion makes the newspaper. There has to be fertile ground for the leader and the idea to fall on. But the leader also has to have some vital seed to sow. To use another figure, a mutual need has to exist before either can become positively effective. Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear.”
― Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda

“They don't try to trade 'reality', they try to trade
other people's perceptions of reality. If a market is dominated by enough technical traders, it could lapse into a 'postmodern' state, with traders trading perceptions of perceptions of reality.”
― Brett Scott, The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money: Hacking the Future of Money

“The teachings of Buddha are eternal, but even then Buddha did not proclaim them to be infallible.

The religion of Buddha has the capacity to change according to times, a quality which no other religion can claim to have...
Now what is the basis of Buddhism?

If you study carefully, you will see that Buddhism is based on reason.
There is an element of flexibility inherent in it, which is not found in any other religion.”
― Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, The Buddha and his Dhamma: A Critical Edition

“I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.”
― Bhim Rao Ambedkar

“The shortest horror story:

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”
― Frederic Brown

“All knowledge leads to self-knowledge.”
― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

“This is the day you will always remember as the day you almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow”
― Captain Jack Sparrow-Pirates of the caribbean: curse of the black pearl

“In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq;3 over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the “dirty war” of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this: Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years? A. Make communism look good.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that "socialism doesn't work" is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.”
― Mark Twain, Notebook

“The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible. –Mark Twain”
― Mark Twain

“Man's dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world──the fight for the Liberation of Mankind”
― Nikolai Ostrovsky

“People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book.”
― Malcolm X

“Truth is on the side of the oppressed.”
― Malcolm X

“The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X