My feelings about Das Kapital are the same as my feeling about the Koran. I
Know it is historically important and i know that many people, not all of whom are idiots, find it a sort of Rock of Ages and containing inspiration. Yet when I look into it, it is to me inexplicable that it can have this effect. Its dreary, out-of-date academic theorizing seems so extraordinarily unsuitable as material for the purpose…Will you promise to read it again, if I do?

- John Maynard Keynes to George Bernard Shaw, December 1934

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Found in
The Last Liberal and Other Essays, Ramachandra Guha

There was a great Marxist called Lenin
Who did two or three million men in
That's a lot to do in
But where he did one in
That great Marxist Stalin did ten in.

- Robert Conquest
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Found in
The Last Liberal and Other Essays, Ramachandra Guha

“we shall have the English language as one of our own, of our own caste, our creed, our sect and of our tradition”

[English] “is the language of our intellectual make-up and not our emotional make-up”.

~ Raja Rao
Found in:
Indian Realities: In Bits and Pieces , Sham Lal

What you are talking about is brutal desire-just-Desire!-the name
of that rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter,
up one old narrow street and down another...

- Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

‘When the facts change I change my mind. And what do you do, sir?’

-John Maynard Keynes, to an unnamed dogmatist.



“ A man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country…he can only have one country…and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life…I did not leave Russia of my own will, even though I disliked much in my Russia and in Russia generally. Yet the right to criticize Russia is mine and because I love it, and I do not give any foreigner the right.”

~The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, on his return to Russia after fifty years in exile

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Found in
The Last Liberal and Other Essays, Ramachandra Guha

“Mourning is hard business,” Cesare said.” If people knew, there’d be less death.”

- Bernard Malamud’s “Life Is Better Than Death”

“I’m good and tired of all these big personalities, destiny molders, and heavy-water brains, Machiavellis and wizard evildoers, big wheels and imposers-upon, absolutists.”

- Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March

“Let us say before I go any further, that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the execrable generation to come.”

- Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies