Sudeep Agarwal

“Akbar took Brahmins to task for misrepresenting Hindu texts to lower castes and hoped that translating Sanskrit texts into Persian would prompt these (in his opinion) arrogant leaders to reform their ways.”
― Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth

“The Sanskrit Brihatsamhita, written perhaps in the sixth century, warns, ‘If a Shiva linga, image, or temple breaks apart, moves, sweats, cries, speaks, or otherwise acts with no apparent cause, this warns of the destruction of the king and his territory.’ Acting on this premise that religious images held political power, Hindu kings targeted one another’s temples beginning in the seventh century, regularly looting and defiling images of Durga, Ganesha, Vishnu, and so forth. They also periodically destroyed each other’s temples. Some Hindu kings even commissioned Sanskrit poetry to celebrate and memorialize such actions.”
― Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth

“The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race. This”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem