Books

  • “What is history, but a fable agreed upon” Dan Brown
  • “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
  • “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
  • “Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.” Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
  • “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
  • “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” George Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four
  • “This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.” Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus
  • “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” George Orwell, Animal Farm

Movies and TV shows

  • “Fate may bind one heart, but it is too fine a thread from which to hang a kingdom” Míriel, Rings of power
  • “None of us were free. We were fools to think we ever could be” Brother Dusk, Foundation
  • “Sometime you leap. And sometimes, someone catches you” Gaal Dornick, Foundation
  • “I know you’re programmed to be that. But I’d like to believe you would have been that way” Brother Dawn, Foundation

Philosophy

  • “You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.” Yuval Noah Harari
  • “The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • “Je pense, donc je suis” René Descartes
  • “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” George Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four

Wisdom

  • “Perhaps the right way to move is to understand before one predicts” Herbert A. Simon
  • “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Allen Grant
  • “It does not matter if the glass is half empty or half full. What matters is that it is refillable” Gaur Gopal Das
  • “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” John Lennon
  • “The best time to buy is when there is blood in the streets.” Baron Rothschild
  • “It is no measure of good heath to be well adjusted to a sick society” Andrea Gibson, The Nutritionist
  • “Achievement is talent plus preparation” Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
  • “…when it comes to good food, nothing comes cheap. Only the currency differs. You either pay with money or with your health.” Shashank Mehta, The Whole Truth

Social

  • “If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.” Yann Martel, Life of Pi
  • “Free expression is not a problem with a solution bounded by the laws of physics that can be hacked together if enough coders pull an all-nighter. It is a dilemma requiring messy trade-offs that leave no one happy.” The Economist, Dec 19th 2022
  • “The people who take the route of showing individual success stories rather than statistical data probably have something to hide” The Plain Bagel