Rajiv Chopra

“Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behaviour. All patterned behaviour tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum. —Darwi Odrade”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an unuprooted small corner of evil.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

“And the truth is that I truly didn’t think of them as human beings. “They’re not human beings, they’re kulak trash!” – that’s what I heard again and again, that’s what everyone kept repeating. And when I think about it all now, I wonder who first talked about kulak trash. Lenin? Was it really Lenin? How the kulaks suffered. In order to kill them, it was necessary to declare that kulaks are not human beings. Just as the Germans said that Yids are not human beings. That’s what Lenin and Stalin said too: The kulaks are not human beings. But that’s a lie. They are people. They are human beings. I can see now that we are all human beings.60”
― Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows

“How enlightened of you, Moneo! Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune