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“I gave an example to a leader once during a conference on the role of governments. I asked him about the job of a traffic policeman standing in the middle of a busy intersection. He said the policeman was there to direct the traffic coming from all directions and make sure no accidents occurred. So I asked him what would happen if he prevented everyone from moving except his friends and relatives. He answered, “He would be a failure, a corrupt person who is not performing his duties.” Governments are the traffic police and their role is to facilitate the movement of life for the people who are driven to build their futures and their nations. Unfortunately our region suffers from an excess of failed traffic policemen.”
― Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, My Story

“Finally, no country has as much stake as India in having a prosperous and civilian democracy in Pakistan. Even though the Nawaz Sharif government was clearly corrupt in many ways, India’s interests are not well served by the undermining of civilian rule in Pakistan, to be replaced by activists and military leaders. Also, the encouragement of cross-border terrorism, which India accuses Pakistan of, is likely to be dampened rather than encouraged by Pakistan’s economic prosperity and civilian politics. It is particularly important in this context to point to the dangerousness of the argument, often heard in India, that the burden of public expenditure [of developing nuclear weapons] would be more unbearable for Pakistan, given its smaller size and relatively stagnant economy, than it is for India. This may well be the case, but the penalty that could visit India from an impoverished and desperate Pakistan, in the present situation of massive insecurity, could be quite catastrophic. Strengthening of Pakistan’s stability and enhancement of its well-being has prudential importance for India, in addition to its obvious ethnical significance. That central connection - between the moral and prudential - must be urgently grasped. [India’s ability to make bombs is still very costly for India with “it being estimated that the additional costs of providing elementary education for every child with neighbourhood schools at every location in the country would cost roughly the same amount of money (as making nukes)”.”
― Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

“The great Cambridge historian F. W. Maitland liked to remind his students that ‘what is now in the past was once in the future’. There could be no better maxim for the historian, and especially the historian of the recent past, who addresses an audience with very decided views on the subjects about which he presumes to inform them. An American historian of the Vietnam War is read by those who have mostly made up their minds on whether the war was just or not.”
― Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

“If a “colonialism bad” perspective cannot represent the full complexity of Hong Kong’s history, returnists also argue that a counterdiscourse describing Chinese rule as “colonial” makes the mistake of flattening distinct colonial regimes under a single descriptor. Returnists see the former remote metropole of London facilitating the expansion of freedom, rights, and rule of law in the city, while also taking an increasingly hands-off approach to the management of local affairs over the course of the colony’s history. Returnists then contrast this model of rule with that of another considerably more proximal metropole, joined by an assumed racial-cultural link, which has only ever taken an increasingly interventionist and controlling approach against the liberalizing trends fostered by the former. The point here is that the Chinese colonization of Hong Kong is not simply a “continuation” of the pre-1997 colonial situation, as a singular discourse of colonization would suggest. Rather, these are two vastly different colonial metropoles, and a significant part of the problem with Chinese colonization in the eyes of returnists is precisely that China has not continued the United Kingdom’s colonial style.”
― Kevin Carrico, Two Systems, Two Countries: A Nationalist Guide to Hong Kong