Best 220 quotes in «pakistan quotes» category

It seemed to me then - and to be honest, sir, seems to me still - that America was engaged only in posturing. As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away. Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own.

it was too loud for hope it was too silent for victory.

It was too quiet for hope, and then too loud for safety. She thought of the people she had lost, of the affection, the smiles, the belonging she could never again take for granted. It was the end of a life, and as she stood there, shivering in the brief night-time chill, it dawned on her that it was the end of her childhood.

Memorialization is not a passive practice but an active conversation.

I walk in the direction she tells me. I feel my pores opening, sweat and heat radiating out of my body. A firefly dances in the distance, leaving tracers, and if I turn my head from side to side, I see long yellow-green streaks that cut through my vision and burn in front of my retinas even after the light that sparked them has gone. I emerge from the mango grove into a field. In the distance unseen trucks pass with a sound like the ocean licking the sand. A tracery of darkness curls into a starry sky, a solitary pipal tree making itself known by an absence of light, like a flame caught in a photographer's negative, frozen, calling me.

I was devastated to learn that both my parents were facing persecution and insults from the entire family. They had failed to raise me to follow the “right path.” The fact that I was adopted was cited as a reason, I was told. Town gossips gleefully whispered juicy details about my misdeeds and my parents’ equally horrific failure to raise their only son to be a good Shia Muslim. The fact that my dear parents were being judged and persecuted felt worse than anything anyone could have done to me personally. It was second only to their desperate pleas with me to label my decisions as mere crimes of passion...

Lund Lund e Pakistan! Maa Chudaega Pakistan! Chuchhi Chodu Pakistan! Kargil Me Mushi ki begam chodo subah shaam

Now, standing here, it is clear as day: more than anything else, you want to find words for what you feel and think and everything that is dark. And then this terrifying thought hits you: Yes, your father wrote poetry to find a language for his wounds. Yes, you in your own way have become your father

My dear, you are not one person. You have many people in you, and each one can ask only some kinds of questions.

No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you. We are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live.

No global corruption scandal can be complete without mentioning Pakistani politicians.

No one who is a friend of Pakistan must say anything that harms its reputation; anyone who dares to ask tough questions or make adverse remarks must be prepared to be categorized as Pakistan’s enemy.

Pakistan has been unfortunate that its leaders and rulers have repeatedly chosen ideological wooden-headedness over pursuit of reasonable and viable options.

Over the years, the British had strategically pitted the Muslims against the Hindus, supporting the All India Muslim League and encouraging the notion that the Muslims were a distinct political community. Throughout British India, separate electorates had been offered to Muslims, underscoring their separateness from Hindus and sowing the seeds of communalism. Teh Morley-Minto reforms in 1908 had allowed direct election for seats and separate or communal representation for Muslims. This was the harbinger for the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. In 1940, the Muslim League, representing one-fifth of the total population of India, became a unifying force. They were resentful that they were not sufficiently represented in Congress and feared for the safety of Islam.

Pakistan’s view of itself as a ‘citadel of Islam’ has created an environment in which violence is normal provided it is committed in the name of Islam.

One can sympathize with the sentiment of Pakistanis who must constantly defend their country against criticism ranging from questioning of its very creation to its current policies. But it is equally important to understand that mere survival does not equate success and that progress often requires uninhibited introspection.

On the subcontinent, Pakistan has passed the point where solar power is cheaper than a lot of electricity that comes from diesel generators,and India is upping its target from 20 to 33 gigawatts to be installed by 2020

Pakistan could continue to survive as it has done so far and defy further negative predictions. But if it does not grow economically sufficiently, integrate globally and remains mired in ideological debates and crises, how would its next seven decades be any different from the past seventy years?

Pakistan’s young median age today means that an overwhelming majority of its current inhabitants were born in a country called Pakistan and, therefore, do not need an explanation other than their birth to be its citizens.

Pakistan is a great nation and Pakistanis are great people. They are friendly and hospitable and the Islam they follow is a religion that welcomes others, as I know from my own experience. In a population of 180 million, there is only a handful of extremists. But, by instilling terror, those few extremists are holding back the development of the entire country.

Pakistan need to better prepare their citizens for the demands of a changing information economy, and they need to adjust tax and social protection systems to ease the transition from labor market to information one.

Pakistan’s unfortunate history may justify the description of Pakistan as being ‘insufficiently imagined’, but imagination is by definition not a finite process. An entity that is insufficiently imagined can be reimagined

Partition memory is particularly pliable. Within it, the act of forgetting, either inevitably or purposefully, seems to play as much a part as remembering itself.

Pakistanis are a pious, warm and hospitable people,’ wrote Richard Leiby, a Washington Post reporter who spent a year and a half there, lamenting that the news from Pakistan did not reflect that. He noted, however, that the bad news about Pakistan was not untrue. In his view, ‘Just like average Americans’, the simple Pakistani people ‘pay the price of their leaders’ magnificent mistakes’.

Pakistan’s poor performance in education is not a function of poverty but of according lower priority by successive governments. There are forty-three countries in the world that are poorer than Pakistan on a per capita GDP basis45 but twenty-four of them send more children to primary school than Pakistan does. Pakistan’s budgetary allocation for education—a meagre 2.6 per cent of GDP in 2015—is abysmally low and actual expenditure—1.5 per cent of GDP—is even less. Pakistan spends around seven times more on its military than on primary education. According to one estimate, just one-fifth of Pakistan’s military budget would be sufficient to finance universal primary education.

Pakistan, unlike India, would not start out with a functioning capital, central government or financial resources, which necessitated greater homework on the part of the Muslim League leaders. Unfortunately, they did little by way of preparation for running the country they had demanded. Many of Pakistan’s teething problems were the result of this ill-preparedness but Pakistani accounts of the country’s early days paint them as hardships inflicted on Muslim Pakistan by its non-Muslim enemies.

Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368, unanimously passed, explicitly recognized the right of the United States to self-defense and further called upon all member states 'to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of the terrorist attacks. It added that 'those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of those acts will be held accountable.' In a speech the following month, the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan publicly acknowledged the right of self-defense as a legitimate basis for military action. The SEAL unit dispatched by President Obama to Abbottabad was large enough to allow for the contingency of bin-Laden's capture and detention. The naïve statement that he was 'unarmed' when shot is only loosely compatible with the fact that he was housed in a military garrison town, had a loaded automatic weapon in the room with him, could well have been wearing a suicide vest, had stated repeatedly that he would never be taken alive, was the commander of one of the most violent organizations in history, and had declared himself at war with the United States. It perhaps says something that not even the most casuistic apologist for al-Qaeda has ever even attempted to justify any of its 'operations' in terms that could be covered by any known law, with the possible exception of some sanguinary verses of the Koran.

Radical and violent manifestations of Islamist ideology, which sometimes appear to threaten Pakistan’s stability, are in some ways a state project gone wrong.

people who ran away are friends!

So, a penniless Obama traveled to a country under martial law, where the U.S. State Department had issued a travel advisory. Obama then ignored the millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, checked into the Hilton International, showered, shaved, and changed into a fresh set of thrift-store clothing to go bird hunting with the country's future prime minister.

Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.

Serious Pakistanis try to explain away the country’s shortcomings, often attributing them to the bad hand that Pakistan was dealt by the circumstances of its birth, its hostile relationship with India, its being a victim of wars and terrorism initiated by external great powers and its misfortune in lacking leadership. Neither attempts to examine structural and systemic flaws, or is willing to acknowledge collective errors and misplaced priorities that do not go away merely by changing leaders.

Responsibility for collective failure or miscalculation can be avoided by lamenting the absence of good leaders. There appears little willingness to consider that Pakistan might need to review some of the fundamental assumptions in its national belief system—militarism, radical Islamist ideology, perennial conflict with India, dependence on external support, and refusal to recognize ethnic identities and religious pluralism—to break out of permanent crisis mode to a more stable future.

Ruby clapped her hands in glee and gave a comedic wiggle of her head, Bollywood style. I know the song now, can even sing it, but back then all I heard was the verdant Punjabi, the striking primary colours of the five rivers, the intricate history of a complex land.

Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.

So long as there are forces of other countries in a place where they have no right to be, irrespective of our rights." (said this to the countries supporting Pakistan's aggression on Kashmir)

Sudden and unexplained deaths of key politicians have been a recurring feature of Pakistani history since 1951. Oft en the reasons have been patently evident.

Someone has done something for us. Something that we can never forget. Something that we can't do again even for our own selves.

The average Pakistani student is brought up on a mix of dogma and mythology that does not encourage respect for facts or empiricism.

That was the strange problem with writing, you had discovered. Meaning never matched the words and words always evaded the thought.

The breakup of Pakistan was the result of the autocratic policies of its state managers rather than the inherent difficulties involved in welding together linguistically and culturally diverse constituent units. Islam proved to be dubious cement not because it was unimportant to people in the different regions. Pakistan’s regional cultures have absorbed Islam without losing affinity to local languages and customs. With some justification, non- Punjabi provinces came to perceive the use of Islam as a wily attempt by the Punjabi- led military–bureaucratic combine to deprive them of a fair share of political and economic power. Non- Punjabi antipathy toward a Punjabi- dominated center often found expression in assertions of regional distinctiveness.

The constant refrain of Islamizing a Muslim-majority country, coupled with the belief that this nation must always be in conflict with its largest neighbour because of religious differences, is in many ways at the heart of most of Pakistan’s current problems.

The collective wisdom in Pakistan seems to be that nothing in Pakistan’s predicament is the result of wrong policy choices made by its leaders and that the only thing Pakistanis need to do is to fend off discussion of the negatives, rather than attend to the negatives themselves.

The Impression that Pakistan being an Islamic State is thereby a Theocratic State is being sedulously fostered in certain quarters with the sole object of discrediting her in the eyes of the world. To anyone conversant with the basic principles of Islam, it should be obvious that in the fields of civics, Islam has always stood on complete social democracy and social justice, as the history of the early Caliphs will show, and has not sanctioned government by a sacerdotal class deriving its authority from God. The ruler and the ruled alike are #equal before Islamic Law, and the ruler, far from being a vicegerent of God on earth, is but a representative of people who have chosen him to serve them...Islam has not recognized any distinction between man and man based on sex, race or worldly possessions..." ---Fazul Rahman, First Education Minister of Pakistan, All Pakistan Educational Conference, Karachi, Nov 1947

The exigencies of maintaining the West Pakistani political, bureaucratic and military elite in power were the major reason why, after Jinnah’s death, the secular Muslim nationalist path was hurriedly abandoned.

The notion that where one is from can be understood using what remains of that place opens up a highly sensitive and rich terrain that can help unpack belonging, especially if that place has now been rendered inaccessible by national borders.

The military is Pakistan’s only institution inherited from the British Raj that has proved resilient and effective. ‘As the history of law, democracy, administration and education in Pakistan demonstrates, other British institutions in what is now Pakistan (and to a lesser extent India as well) failed to take root, failed to work, or have been transformed in ways that their authors would scarcely have recognized.

The obstinate refusal to consider reform proposals and the insistence on rewriting history rather than learning from it have trapped Pakistan in a vicious circle. Instead of acknowledging bad decisions and moving away from them, Pakistan’s policymakers deny their bad choices; they then make further wrong decisions to support their denial, with further consequences and further denials. It is, based on the criteria defined by Tuchman, classic folly.

The problem with Pakistani politics is not only that the elite rule, but also that the masses want celebrities or influential people to represent them. This is a flawed mindset. By doing this, the people create the electables’, and discourage the growth of grassroots politics.

The people have realized that Martial Law is not law. A regime not established by law is devoid of the attribute to dispense law. A regime which puts in a bunker the highest law in the land does not have the moral authority to say that nobody is above the law.