Himanshu Rai

“To choose wisely, we must unlearn much of the history we have been taught. Many of us learned a version of our history as one of inevitable progress, goodness, and triumph. Many of us learned the inverted version, that our history is one of inevitable sin, racism, conquest, greed. Neither of these is true, because both versions airbrush out our own free will. The truth is, America is a battle, a struggle for justice. And we choose, every generation, who wins.”
― Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

“Men at some time are masters of their fate:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves that we are underlings.”
― Fali S. Nariman, Before Memory Fades: An Autobiography

“Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“The art of reading, as of learning, is this:… to retain the essential, to forget the nonessential.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany