Aditya Raman

“They's a lot of fellas wanta know what reds is.' He laughed. 'One of our boys from foun' out.' He patted the piled earth gently with his shovel. 'Fella named Hines--got 'bout thirty thousan' acres, peaches and grapes--got a cannery an' a winery. Well, he's all a time talkin' about 'them goddam reds'. 'Goddamn reds is drivin' the country to ruin,' he says, an' 'We got to drive these here red bastards out.'

Well, they were a young fella jus' come out west here, an' he's listenin' one day. He kinda scratched his head an' he says, 'Mr. Hines, I ain't been here long. What is those goddamn reds?'

Well sir, Hines says, 'A red is any son-of-a-bitch that wants thirty cents an hour when we're payin' twenty-five!"

Well, this young fella he thinks about her, an' he scratches his head, an' he says, 'Well, Jesus, Mr. Hines, I ain't a son-of-a-bitchm but if that's what a red is--why, I want thirty cents an hour.
Every'body does. Hell, Mr. Hines, we're all reds.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them.”
― Stafford Beer

“And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and static moment when our future comes upon us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and accidental point when it happens to us as if from the outside. The quieter, the more patient and open we are in our sadness, the deeper and more unerringly the new will penetrate into us, the better we shall acquire it, the more it will be our fate, and when one day in the future it ‘takes place’ (that is, steps out of us towards others) we shall feel related and close to it in our inmost hearts. And that is necessary. It is necessary – and little by little our development will tend in this direction – that nothing alien should happen to us, but only what has long been part of us.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.
In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value.
In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value.

How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions?
How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?
If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.”
― Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Writings And Speeches: A Ready Reference Manual