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“We could all learn from the dignified but strong way in which Sartaj summed up his feelings about Dadri. His words contained within them both the tragedy and the promise of our country’s future. ‘I just want to say a small thing and make a plea. We have all read the song, we all know the words,â€� he told me. ‘Saare jahan se accha, Hindustan hamara, mazhab nahin sikhata, aapas mein bair rakhna... If we could just follow the sentiments expressed in this song, we will be fine as a country.â€� The words were heartbreaking for the sheer generosity of spirit they displayed. They showed perhaps the only way in which the fault lines of this unquiet land can be mended.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“Feminization is the process in which cultures have increasingly respected the interests and values of women. Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity

“The obscurantist and atavistic state that Narendra Modi’s BJP wants to create would look nothing like the one that made India the scientific superpower of the ancient age. It is enough to make one shed a tear. One can only hope that there are no peahens around.”
― Shashi Tharoor, The Paradoxical Prime Minister

“The historian Pieter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that “democracy came too earlyâ€� to America.85 In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took over the state before it had forced them to lay down their arms â€� which, as the Second Amendment famously affirms, they reserve the right to keep and bear. In other words Americans, and especially Americans in the South and West, never fully signed on to a social contract that would vest the government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In much of American history, legitimate force was also wielded by posses, vigilantes, lynch mobs, company police, detective agencies, and Pinker-tons, and even more often kept as a prerogative of the individual.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity