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Quote by Dervla Murphy

“With our mad lust for Uniformity and a Higher Standard of Living and Expanding Markets, we go to a country like Afghanistan and cruelly try to jerk her forward two thousand years in two decades, giving no thought to the profound shock this must be to her national psychology.”

Quote by Dervla Murphy

Book:Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

Work

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

This book is a personal account of a long-distance bicycle trip from Ireland to India. The author details the challenges, experiences, and insights gained during the journey. more

Author

Dervla Murphy, born on November 28, 1931, is an Irish cyclist and travel writer, renowned for her adventurous bicycle journeys across Africa, Asia, and South America. more

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“Undoubtedly the Afghans must be, by our standards, the best-looking people in the world. They have everything; height, proportions, carriage, features and complexion.”

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Book:Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

Source: Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“The more I see of life in these 'undeveloped countries' and of the methods adopted to 'improve' them, the more depressed I become. It seems criminal that the backwardness of a country like Afghanistan should be used as an excuse for America and Russia to have a tug-of-war for possession.”

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Book:Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

Source: Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this.”

Ifs Has Beens Age Past Moving Cities Absolutes Ugly Afghanistan Epic Asia Literal Traveller Crude Binding Enchantment Epic Poems

Book:Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

Source: Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“one of the advantages of cycling is that it automatically prevents a journey from becoming an Expedition.”

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Book:Full Tilt: Dunkirk to Delhi by Bicycle

Source: Full Tilt: Dunkirk to Delhi by Bicycle

“Buying a bicycle is a momentous event, akin to marriage: you are acquiring a partner.”

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Source: South From the Limpopo

“perhaps there is something more than courtesy behind the dissembling reticence of childhood. ... Most artists dislike having their incomplete work considered and discussed and this analogy, I think, is valid. The child is incomplete, too, and is constantly experimenting as he seeks his own style of thought and feeling.”

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Author:Dervla Murphy

“one feels guilty on behalf of Western civilisation. What damage are we doing, blindly and swiftly, to those races who are being taught that because we are materially richer we must be emulated without question? What compels us to infect everyone else with our own sick urgency to change, soften and standardise? How can we have the effrontery to lord it over peoples who retain what we have lost - a sane awareness that what matters most is immeasurable?”

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“It is far easier to explain to a three-year-old how babies are made than to explain the processes whereby bread or sugar appear on the table.”

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“Is this something else our age does - on the one hand make communication easier than ever before, while on the other hand widening the gulf between those who are 'developed' and those who are not?”

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Source: Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“hatred, however apparently justifiable, excusable or inevitable, always damages the hater.”

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