Divyansh Singh > Divyansh's Quotes

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

“When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else's oppression, we'll find our opportunities to make real change.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is that they must change if they are to get better.”
― Georg Lichtenberg

“Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

“Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr.

“The world howls for social justice, but when it comes to social responsibility, you sometimes can't even hear crickets chirping.”
― Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth. In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.”
― Bryan Stevenson

“For there is always light,
If only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry

“If your social consciousness seems stuck in 1975, 2014 is gonna be a rough ride.”
― John Scalzi

“The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.”
― Jane Addams

“I prefer open hostility to the poisonous silence of supposed neutrality or the empty lip service of performative solidarity.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“Hoist your heart as beacon to the whole,
Stand your feet as anchor to ethics.
Speak your spine as wave of integrity,
Ride your brain as cure for prejudice.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator

“Colonizer of A Different Kind
(The Sonnet)

Only the shape of colonialism
has changed, not the nature.
Tendencies are just as filthy,
rightful heir to animal disaster.

I too am a colonizer,
but of a different kind.
I colonize no home by force,
with words I colonize minds.

Humanitarianism is civilized colonialism -
simpler still, humanitarianism is civilization.
That's the contagion my literature carries,
through my proses and sonnetic revelation.

First thousand were an accident,
Second thousand, a promise.
Answer to traditional animosity,
Antidote to doting prejudice.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Little Planet on The Prairie: Dunya Benim, Sorumluluk Benim

“One week of my life produces enough electricity to power a hundred years of humanitarian intervention.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Little Planet on The Prairie: Dunya Benim, Sorumluluk Benim

“Creativity flourishes with practice, collaboration, and a willingness to embrace failure—not as a personal shortcoming, but as a challenge to the systems that tell us our ideas must be perfect or profitable to matter.”
― Frankie Saturn, You Are Creative: Free Yourself to Free the World

“Pursing unity without justice is forging harmony built on harm.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”
― Chris Maser, Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest

“What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?”
― Henry David Thoreau, Familiar letters

“You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park / Congo

“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people. ”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”
― Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyones arguing over where they're going to sit”
― David Suzuki

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring