Karan Gupta

“India is becoming a large middle income country, too complex and varied to be controlled centrally. The government will need to withdraw from occupying the commanding heights of the economy, confining itself to providing public goods and the governing framework, and leaving economic activity to the people.”
― Raghuram G. Rajan, I Do What I Do

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it's not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“No one is simply a painter anymore. They are all archaeologists, psychologists and partisans of a particular culture or theory. They enjoy our erudition and our philosophy and like us they are full, perhaps to excess, with a treasure-trove of half-baked and rather unremarkable ideas. They like form- not for what it is but because of what it might represent. They are the children of generation tormented by their learning, a thousand miles away from the Old Masters who never read, instead being content to provide a feast for the eye.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power