Shagun Tripathi

“The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner’s debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate. They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them. Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil. Before there was a United States of America, there was enslavement. Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve generations.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“I have long exercised an honest introspection, the exquisitely painful approach to wisdom. Self−scrutiny,
relentless observance of one's thoughts, is a stark and shattering experience. It pulverizes the stoutest ego. But true self−analysis mathematically operates to produce seers. The way of 'self−expression,' individual
acknowledgements, results in egotists, sure of the right to their private interpretations of God and the universe. Truth humbly retires, no doubt, before such arrogant originality.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

“Maybe one day we’ll look in the mirror and be happy with the fair-to-middling upright ape that eyes us back, and we’ll gather our breath and think: OK, we’re alone, so be it. Maybe that day is coming soon. Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentring ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“India, materially poor for the last two centuries, yet has an inexhaustible fund of divine wealth; spiritual
“skyscrapers” may occasionally be encountered by the wayside, even by worldly men like this policeman.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi