“...if we accept contemporary literature as sufficient evidence, the society of Paris today is fully as corrupt as that of the Punjab in 1830; and the bazaars of Lahore, while Ranjit Singh was celebrating the festival of the Holi,were not so shameless as Piccadilly at night in 1892.”

“At the heart of the celebration, there are the poor. If [they] are excluded, it is not longer a celebration. [...] A celebration must always be a festival of the poor.”

“We all want to be stars. The idea of being revered and envied must be encoded somewhere deep in our DNA. So must the desire to revere and envy others we imagine to be better, more accepted, and more popular than we are. The only problem is that the most necessary qualities required to be a celebrity -- self-absorption, egomania, shamelessness -- are the least attractive in a friend.”

“Fakir Azizuddin. He was one of the ablest and certainly the most honest of all Ranjit Singh's courtiers. Azizuddin was of so engaging a disposition, and soperfect a courtier in his manners, that he made fewdeclared enemies, though many were doubtless jealous of his influence. One reason of his popularity, as aMuhammadan minister at a Hindu Court, was the liberality of his belief. He was a Sufi, a sect held,indeed, as infidel by orthodox Muhammadans, but to which the best thinkers and poets of the East havebelonged. He had no love for the barren dogmata of the Kuran, but looked on all religions as equally to be respected and disregarded. On one occasion Ranjit Singh asked him whether he preferredthe Hindu or the Muhammadan religion. ' I am,' he replied, 'I am a man floating in the midst of a mighty river. I turn my eyes towards the land, but candistinguish no difference in either bank.”

“We were born alone and we will die alone. But, while we are on this planet, we must accept and glorify our act of faith through other people. Community is life: from it comes our capacity for survival. That is how it was when we lived in caves and so it is today.”

“These days its not just that the line between right and wrong has been made unclear, today Christians are being asked by our culture today to erase the lines and move the fences, and if that were not bad enough, we are being asked to join in the celebration cry by those who have thrown off the restraints religion had imposed upon them. It is not just that they ask we accept, but they now demand of us to celebrate it too.”