Memorable Quotes

This post will be continuously updating one, with updates whenever I come across an excellent quote.

1. Andrew Marvell

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near

2. William Wordsworth

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

3. Philip Mason

Empires are not made by men who see both sides of a question

Intellectual Wavering in Old Age

Firmness in believing what one considers to be true, must be related to one's age in a simple-harmonic way. When you are too young, you are vulnerable to inculcation from authority-figures. The thought of questioning them is unthinkable and doing so portrayed as a bad trait. When one grows into an adult, one is self-sufficient, clear in thought (at least some) and is free to believe what one thinks is true. When this same person enters old age, the faculty of free thought is seen to be wilting in many people. Atheists may suddenly turn into diehard believers, creating a shot in the arm for believers to accuse rationalists of the fickleness of their thought.

The reason for change in old ages is not that the person suddenly stumbling upon the truth in light of the experience he has accumulated. This is explainable only upon the basis of physical and mental health, which deteriorates in advanced age. When you are no longer able to move from place to place, when you are ridden with diseases, when you are not economically self-sufficient, you lose the power to see reason. The old man has only one aim in life – to prolong at, whatever be the cost. So, the recantation of earlier ideas is the result of the helplessness originating from a deformed mind, and not because one’s earlier ideas were false.

Response to Vijay Prashad's Article

The following is the response to Vijay Prashad's article on the Hindu citing economic reasons for the surge in ISIS violence in Iraq. 
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Vijay Prashad’s article on ‘The Pendulum of the Islamic State’ on the The Hindu dated 06-09-2014 was thoroughly informative on the status quo of the conflict between IS and the Iraqi – Syrian regimes. Apart from that, it was a futile and totally off-the-mark assessment of what really caused the uprising. Prashad’s accusation of the ‘neo-liberal policies that increased inequality and despair and corruption’ is an oversimplified analysis of a vexing issue. Forest fires are more rampant in those years when ice-cream sales soar, but do ice-creams cause forest fires?

When it comes to violence motivated by religious ideology, we have consistently been reluctant to point the finger at the real culprit – fanaticism. People’s conception of what their religion teaches – real or perceived – is the cause of so much killing. Unless we identify the real reason, whatever we may do will turn out to be ineffective. Of course, there is repression, inequality and despair in Iraq or Syria, but not in these states alone! They are everywhere, in India, in Africa or even in America, but nowhere there is a conflagration which can even remotely be compared in scale to the atrocities of IS. We have to accept religious fanaticism as the motive. What else might be the reason that prompts educated young men from affluent backgrounds in India and Europe to travel to Iraq to take part in the fight on IS’ behalf? The perpetrators of 9/11 were also rich and educated young men with decent family backgrounds. “With or without religion, good people do good and bad people do bad, but for good people to do bad, that takes religion” as Steven Weinberg once remarked.

Unless we recognize religious fanaticism as the root cause of the present violence in the world and indoctrination from a young age as the way in which it is cultivated, nothing good will come out of wasting newspaper space for irrelevant articles like the one mentioned above, which itself is suspected to be of the product of another kind of fanaticism – the political!