Arpit Raj

“Vonnegut did not seem to be saying, as I understood Hem[ingway] to be saying, that his Terrible Event had forever exempted him from the usual human obligations of being kind, attempting to understand, behaving decently. On the contrary, Vonnegut seemed to feel that unkindness--a simple, idiotic failure of belief in the human, by men and their systems--had been the cause of his Terrible Event, and that what he had learned from this experience was not the importance of being tough and hard and untouchable, but the importance of preserving the kindness in ourselves at all costs.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“The case for doing what one sees as one’s duty must be strong, but how can we be indifferent to the consequences that may follow from our doing what we take to be our just duty?”
― Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

“It is also interesting to note that the greatest grammarian in Sanskrit (indeed possibly in any language), namely Pāṇini, who systematized and transformed Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin (he describes his village on the banks of the river Kabul).”
― Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

“Important as history is, reasoning has to go beyond the past.”
― Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity