Thoughts………

Extremism is so easy. You've got your position and thats it. It doesnt take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right, you meet the same idiots coming from the left.

- Clint Eastwood


Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy – by one or more or all of them. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines or dogmas or rituals or books or temples are but secondary details.

- Swami Vivekananda as quoted by Paul Theroux in ‘Ghost Train to the Eastern Star’


Defeat has a dignity which noisy victory does not deserve

- Borges as quoted by Paul Theroux in ‘Ghost Train to the Eastern Star’


A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That’s why no regime anywhere has even loved its great writers, only its minor ones

- Solzhenitsyn, in The First Circle, as quoted by Paul Theroux in ‘Ghost Train to the Eastern Star’


Next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought can offer

- Nabokov as quoted by Paul Theroux in ‘Ghost Train to the Eastern Star’


When buffaloes fight, the grass gets trampled

- Burmese proverb


……’Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi lempo felice
ne la miseria….’

……’There is no greater sorrow
than to recall our times off joy
in wretchedness……’

- Dante’s Francesca da Rimini



A word said is a shot fired

- Uzbek saying


Ten dervishes can sleep under one blanket,
but two kings cannot find room in one clime

- Babur-Nama


He was a very kind man and very sincere, with a strict devotion to his religious calling, although, like many Chinese, he had a very bad temper

- Dalai Lama


……he was over polite, which is invariably a sign of someone not to be trusted

- Dalai Lama



From ‘Never a Dull Moment. With Men of Honour and dishonour’ by R D Pradhan
A conversation between Lt. General Thorat and Jawaharlal Nehru

“You know, Thorat? You Maharashtrians are like mules. Normally you are good and docile, but when you dig your toes in, it is impossible to dislodge you.”

“Is it a bad trait when you know that you are in the right, sir?” I ventured to remark.

“Well-no,” he said, “but it’s most irritating.”