“They ask me, why aren't you still properly known in the mainstream! Well, the Himalayas have been standing for 40 million years, yet it's only in the last century that humans first climbed Everest. They are oblivious of me, because once you get addicted to the transcendental terrains of the Himalayas, all your superficial little molehills will crumble to dust.”
Source: Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets
“Mexico is a beacon of hope for the whole world as its leaders, activists, and philosophers call for a new humanist reality.”
Source: Humanism - Mexico's Call: The evolution of a humanist philosophy that will impact the world.
“During the first year I tried to write like an intellectual, until I realized, that's not me. So I abandoned the intellectual facade, and became unapologetically human in my writing, and I haven't looked back since.
The tone of 'In Search of Divinity' was so different that I even thought of publishing by a pseudonym. Today I am glad that I did not change my name, for the different new tone was the true voice of mine.
Monkey see, monkey imitate - Human challenge is to find yourself. Once you do, that's when you start to glow, Synthetic sparklers only drag you to descent.”
Source: Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets
“The problem lies in the hubris of the designing parents, in their drive to master the mystery of birth. Even if this disposition does not make parents tyrants to their children, it disfigures the relation between parent and child, and deprives the parent of the humility and enlarged human sympathies that an openness to the unbidden can cultivate.”
Source: The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering
“There is a definite linkage between the Humanist legacy and the vernacular movement, in the sense that those scholars who did most to preserve the prestige of Buchanan as a classic text for Latin classes in Scotland were also the same men who did most to encourage the idea of the Scottish tongue as being as suitable as a vehicle for classic poetry as any other modern language.”
Source: The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth Century
“On the ferry back from Büyükada
the setting sun’s soft rays
scarcely light the faces
of my fellow weary travellers
sons joke with their fathers
daughters sleep on mothers’ laps
friends play faded playing cards
with an envelope for the missing jack
here a toddler’s hand under his chin
like a scholar there a family roars
with laughter eating sunflower seeds
from a pink plastic bag
we breathe the crisp marmara sea
together suddenly i loved you
despite your carnival of violence
i love you Humanity!
with all your many ifs
and your many thens”
“You are the gospel you need to read.”
Source: Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets
“I long to get away, sometimes, from my own generation. I don't care whether it's into the past, or into the future, so long as it's away from the patter into simple realities again. I hate being a slave to my own age.
...
We are so afraid of sentimentality that we're losing the power of human feeling. Our writers today understand all the brutalities and cynicisms; but how many of them understand the simple human affections that hold decent human beings together and make the world worth living in?”
Source: The Sun Cure
“In some circles, I am called a genius,
Yet the only genius I know of is service.
In other circles, I am branded fraud,
Yet the only fraud I know of is prejudice.”
Source: Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch
“contiguous, adj.
I felt silly for even mentioning it, but once I did, I knew I had to explain.
"When I was a kid, "I had this puzzle with all fifty states on it--you know, the kind where you have to fit them all together. And one day I got it in my head that California and Nevada were in love. I told my mom, and she had no idea what I was talking about. I ran and got those two pieces and showed it to her--California and Nevada, completely in love. So a lot of the time when we're like this"--my ankles against the backs of your ankles, my knees fitting into the backs of your knees, my thighs on the backs of your legs, my stomach against your back, my chin folding into your neck--"I can't help but think about California and Nevada, and how we're a lot like them. If someone were drawing us from above as a map. that's what we'd look like; that's how we are."
For a moment, you were quiet. And then you nestled in and whispered.
"Contiguous."
And I knew you understood.”
Source: The Lover's Dictionary