Partition Best Quotes

If we want to understand people and relate to them, we must be self-aware and have self-compassion. Self-love may be a source of division but can become a key to sympathy, bridging gaps, and fostering connection instead of partition. ("Being my best friend")

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

Stripped of the kind of judgments that are at the very heart of the idea of "credit", shot through with bad faith, [the mortgage broker's] work is now predicated on irresponsibility, rooted in the absence of community. Whatever lingering fiduciary consciousness he may have has become a liability, given the general rush to irresponsibility by his competitors. The work cannot sustain him as a human being. Rather, it damages the best part of him, and it becomes imperative to partition work off from the rest of life.

There was a fair mixture of animals in the long building. The dairy cows took up most of the length, then there were a few young heifers, some bullocks and finally, in an empty stall deeply bedded with straw, the other farm dogs. The cats were there too, so it had to be warm. No animal is a better judge of comfort than a cat and they were just visible as furry balls in the straw. They had the best place, up against the wooden partition where the warmth came through from the big animals.

So spacious, and his line stretched out so far, That Man may know he dwells not in his own— An edifice too large for him to fill, Lodged in a small partition, and the rest Ordained for uses to his Lord best known.

In many ways, the partition of India was the inevitable result of three centuries of Britain’s divide-and-rule policy. As the events of the Indian Revolt demonstrated, the British believed that the best way to curb nationalist sentiment was to classify the indigenous population not as Indians, but as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, etc. The categorization and separation of native peoples was a common tactic for maintaining colonial control over territories whose national boundaries had been arbitrarily drawn with little consideration for the ethnic, cultural, or religious makeup of the local inhabitants. The French went to great lengths to cultivate class divisions in Algeria, the Belgians promoted tribal factionalism in Rwanda, and the British fostered sectarian schisms in Iraq, all in a futile attempt to minimize nationalist tendencies and stymie united calls for independence. No wonder, then, that when the colonialists were finally expelled from these manufactured states, they left behind not only economic and political turmoil, but deeply divided populations with little common ground on which to construct a national identity.

When, in Paradise Lost, Adam asks about the movements of the heavens, Raphael refuses to answer. “Let it speak,” he says, “the Maker’s high magnificence, who built / so spacious, and his line stretcht out so far; / That man may know he dwells not in his own; / An edifice too large for him to fill, / Lodg’d in a small partition, and the rest / Ordain’d for uses to his Lord best known.

when Atlantic Monthly published one of Thoreau’s essays, called “Walking.” At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, when fences shall be multiplied, and mantraps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days are upon us. Anthropologists estimate that early man walked twenty miles a day. Mental and physical benefits have been attributed to walking as far back as ancient times. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) described walking as one of the “Medicines of the Will.” Hippocrates, the Greek physician, called walking “man’s best medicine” and prescribed walks to treat emotional problems, hallucinations, and digestive disorders.

She made herself ill remembering her last words to him, hearing them over and over as she carried her bucket up and down the stairs, as she ate her lonely soup, as she sat in the confessional before the priest. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” She leaned on the partition, feeling the dampness at her forehead and her breast from the holy water’s anointment. “It has been one month since my last confession.” “And what sins have you committed since then?” Father Marche’s question was so familiar, his cadence always precisely the same, kind but tired, a little bored. Violetta always gave her rote response: acts of laziness and selfishness, disobeying the prioress, taking the Lord’s name in vain. Not today. Her words choked her. She could hardly get them out. “I have lied to a friend.” Father looked at her through the grate. He’d never done that. “This weighs on you.” She nodded; tears spilled from her eyes. “It is unforgivable.” “Nothing is unforgivable with penance and contrition,” he said with a kind of faith Violetta could not muster. He went on about Hail Marys; she said them aloud in a daze. He gave her absolution, but it did nothing to ease her mind or heart. As she left the confessional, she felt diseased by her own actions. Mino thought she didn’t care. But apart from music, he was the best thing in her life.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the PUBLIC road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

No, my dear. Leave poor Hari Kumar to work out his own salvation, if he’s still alive to work it out and if there’s a salvation of any kind for a boy like him. He is the leftover, the loose end of our reign, the kind of person we created—I suppose with the best intentions. But for all Nehru’s current emergence as a potential moral force in world affairs, I see nothing in India that will withstand the pressure of the legacy of the division we English have allowed her to impose on herself, and are morally responsible for. In allowing it we created a precedent for partition just at the moment when the opposite was needed, allowed it—again with the best intentions—as a result of tiredness, and failing moral and physical pretensions that just wouldn’t stand the strain of looking into the future to see what abdication on India’s terms instead of ours was going to mean. Perhaps finally we had no terms of our own because we weren’t clever enough to formulate them in twentieth century dress, and so the world is going to divide itself into isolated little pockets of dogma and mutual resistance, and the promise that always seemed to lie behind even the worst aspects of our colonialism will just evaporate into history as imperial mystique, foolish glorification of a severely practical and greedy policy.

For the mainly Urdu- speaking migrants from India who abandoned home and hearth to make their futures in a predominantly non- Urdu speaking country, Pakistan was the land of opportunity. Better educated than most of their coreligionists in western Pakistan, they expected to get the best jobs. Some of these muhajirs, as the refugees from India came to be known, had sensibly moved their money before partition in the hope of starting up new businesses in both wings of the country. The idea of material gain encapsulated in “Pakistan Zindabad” was a stretch removed from the other more loaded slogan, defining its meaning in vague Islamic terms. But for all their claims dressed up in religious terminology, the protagonists of an Islamic state too had their sights on power and pelf in the Muslim El Dorado.

The Province of Sindh (now a state in Pakistan) is bordered on the east by the Thar desert of India and in the west by the mountains of Baluchistan; it boasts of the port city of Karachi as well as the remains of the Indus Valley civilization. Its history is chequered and is best known by the brief message ‘PECCAVI’ sent by its British conqueror Charles Napier to his superiors in the Bombay Presidency. Tracing its origin to the Indus Valley settlements of Mohen-jo-daro (itself a Sindhi word meaning the ‘gate/hillock of the dead’), Sindh was part of various Hindu kingdoms up to 712 AD when Mohammed bin Kasim conquered it and established Muslim rule. Various Muslim dynasties ruled over Sindh undisturbed until 1843 when the British decided that its strategic importance necessitated its conquest. The colonial policies of land and education tipped the economic and social balance. The Hindu minority of Sindh which had always been rich but unobtrusive, now cornered powerful positions in the nineteenth century, evoking a strong feeling among Sindhi Muslim leaders that they had not received their just desserts.

1 = Very important. Do this at once. 2 = Worth doing but takes more time. Start planning it. 3 = Yes and no. Depends on how it’s done. 4 = Not very important. May even be a waste of effort. 5 = No! Don’t do this. Fill in those numbers before you read further, and take your time. This is not a simple situation, and solving it is a complicated undertaking. Possible Actions to Take ____ Explain the changes again in a carefully written memo. ____ Figure out exactly how individuals’ behavior and attitudes will have to change to make teams work. ____ Analyze who stands to lose something under the new system. ____ Redo the compensation system to reward compliance with the changes. ____ “Sell” the problem that is the reason for the change. ____ Bring in a motivational speaker to give employees a powerful talk about teamwork. ____ Design temporary systems to contain the confusion during the cutover from the old way to the new. ____ Use the interim between the old system and the new to improve the way in which services are delivered by the unit—and, where appropriate, create new services. ____ Change the spatial arrangements so that the cubicles are separated only by glass or low partitions. ____ Put team members in contact with disgruntled clients, either by phone or in person. Let them see the problem firsthand. ____ Appoint a “change manager” to be responsible for seeing that the changes go smoothly. ____ Give everyone a badge with a new “teamwork” logo on it. ____ Break the change into smaller stages. Combine the firsts and seconds, then add the thirds later. Change the managers into coordinators last. ____ Talk to individuals. Ask what kinds of problems they have with “teaming.” ____ Change the spatial arrangements from individual cubicles to group spaces. ____ Pull the best people in the unit together as a model team to show everyone else how to do it. ____ Give everyone a training seminar on how to work as a team. ____ Reorganize the general manager’s staff as a team and reconceive the GM’s job as that of a coordinator. ____ Send team representatives to visit other organizations where service teams operate successfully. ____ Turn the whole thing over to the individual contributors as a group and ask them to come up with a plan to change over to teams. ____ Scrap the plan and find one that is less disruptive. If that one doesn’t work, try another. Even if it takes a dozen plans, don’t give up. ____ Tell them to stop dragging their feet or they’ll face disciplinary action. ____ Give bonuses to the first team to process 100 client calls in the new way. ____ Give everyone a copy of the new organization chart. ____ Start holding regular team meetings. ____ Change the annual individual targets to team targets, and adjust bonuses to reward team performance. ____ Talk about transition and what it does to people. Give coordinators a seminar on how to manage people in transition. There are no correct answers in this list, but over time I’ve

Thank you so much for coming,” I said to my mother. “It was right that you were there.” “I enjoyed myself very much, and would like to extend an invitation of my own. Would you join me in my quarters for tea?” “Yes, thank you. That would be lovely, and warm.” Her cheeks were rosy from the day’s activity, and mine were no doubt a match. “Shall we say a half hour? And, Alera, please ask Narian to escort you.” My eyebrows rose dramatically. “I don’t know if that would be best,” I hedged, for I had no idea how Narian would react to her invitation. She drew me away from the Cokyrian sentries stationed by the door and dropped her volume. “Alera, if you’re going to marry this man, he’s going to be my son. I want to know him better.” “Yes, but…I don’t know if he’d be comfortable. He’s very reserved, and probably wouldn’t say much.” “Then those are things I’ll learn about him. It can’t hurt to ask him, can it? If he prefers not to come, I’ll accept his decision.” My mother was full of subtlety. She did not say that she would understand his decision, only that she would accept it. And her phrasing wasn’t really chosen with Narian in mind--it was to let me know that this was important, and that I should do all I could to ensure he would be there. “I’ll do my best,” I agreed, thinking that this would be the quietest tea I had ever attended. Leaving my mother behind, I walked through the antechamber and across the Hearing Hall to reach Narian’s headquarters, which was situated in the former strategy room between Cannan’s office and mine. As always, there was much activity in the partitioned room; I also could not simply knock on the door to his private office, for a Cokyrian sentry prevented access to him without an appointment. In the end, I directed one of Narian’s officers to inform him that I wished to speak with him about an “urgent provincial matter.” “Shall we go to your study?” Narian asked when he emerged from his office, knowing full well I had no political matters to address. “Yes, I think that would be best.” I couldn’t repress a smile, for his eyes sparkled with curiosity. As soon as we had closed the door to my study, and before I could speak, Narian kissed me, catching me by surprise. “I’ve wanted to do that all afternoon, Alera. I’m not particularly fond of the gowns Hytanican women wear, but I’m willing to make an exception for this one.” I laughed, my head spinning, and he took hold of my hands. “Now, what’s this about?” “My mother has invited me to tea, and we would be pleased to have you join us.” Despite how casual I was trying to sound, Narian stiffened, and I could feel him pulling away. This wasn’t going to be easy. “You both would like me to join you?” “Yes, she suggested it.” I took a deep breath and made my confession. “She knows that we’re betrothed, that we’re in love.” I couldn’t gauge his reaction from his face, but the fact that he released my hands suggested he was disturbed, piqued--not an encouraging sign. I waited, giving him a chance to straighten out his thoughts, then tried again. “I know we agreed not to tell anyone--” “Yes, we did,” he snapped, walking over to my desk, not meeting my eyes. This was so uncharacteristic of him that I knew I had to proceed very carefully. “Please listen. We agreed not to tell anyone, but she’s my mother. She won’t breathe a word.” “How can you be sure?” I almost laughed, confused as to how he could question that. “Because she’s my mother! She raised me, Narian. I’ve always been able to trust her. Just believe me.

Smaller than Delaware, packed with 2.7 million people, the core of a proposed future Palestinian state, the occupied West Bank is partitioned by the Oslo Accords into zones of Palestinian and Israeli control: Areas A, B, and C. Each of the zones has its own restrictions, guidelines, regulations. A political map of the territory looks like an X-ray: a diseased heart, mottled, speckled, clotted, hollowed out.

He settled into the Chelsea apartment as best he could with everything in his life in turmoil — no permanent abode, no publishing agreements, growing difficulties with the police, and what was to happen now with Marianne? — but when he turned on the TV he saw a great wonder that dwarfed what was happening to him. The Berlin Wall was falling, and young people were dancing on its remains. That year, which began with horrors — on a small scale the fatwa, on a much larger scale Tiananmen — also contained great wonders. The magnificence of the invention of the hypertext transfer protocol, the http:// that would change the world, was not immediately evident. But the fall of Communism was. He had come to England as a teenage boy who had grown up in the aftermath of the bloody partition of India and Pakistan, and the first great political event to take place in Europe after his arrival was the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Oh no, he had thought, are they partitioning Europe now? Years later, when he visited Berlin to take part in a TV discussion with Günter Grass, he had crossed the wall on the S-Bahn and it had looked mighty, forbidding, eternal. The western side of the wall was covered in graffiti but the eastern face was ominously clean. He had been unable to imagine that the gigantic apparatus of repression whose icon it was would ever crumble. And yet the day came when the Soviet terror-state was shown to have rotted from within, and it blew away, almost overnight, like sand. Sic semper tyrannis. He took renewed strength from the dancing youngsters’ joy.

Jews continued moving into Palestine and their Zionist dream began looking more like a possibility than ever before. On November 29, 1947, amid much controversy, the United Nations announced the “partition” of Palestine into two states, one for Jews and the other for Arabs already living in the country. Truman had lobbied quietly for this partition, despite opposition from the Arab states, the British, and his own State Department. He wrote later of his belief that partition “could open the way to peaceful collaboration between the Arabs and the Jews.” Six months later, the British formally withdrew, and the partition went into effect in May 1948. Jews around the world rejoiced, but Arab leaders were understandably enraged and threatened war. Despite his support for partition and sympathy for the plight of Jews, Truman was cautious about offering public support for Zionism. Given the growing tension in the region, he thought it was in America’s best interest for their president to be seen as an honest broker in the conflict.

Meanwhile King ‘Abdullah of Transjordan had his own ambitions to dominate as much as possible of Palestine, having done his best to come to terms with both the Zionists and his British backers over his plans for the country. As Avi Shlaim reports in Collusion Across the Jordan, his account of this era, extensive clandestine contact took place between King ‘Abdullah and Jewish Agency leaders (later Israeli prime ministers) Moshe Sharett and Golda Meir.30 As the United Nations moved toward partition of Palestine, the king repeatedly met with them secretly in the hope of reaching an accord in which Jordan would incorporate the part of Palestine to be designated for its Arab majority. The king confidently gave them his assurances that the Palestinians would come around and assent to his rule.* Thus ‘Abdullah, unlike Iraq’s Nuri, had no use for any form of independent Palestinian leadership or for a body like the Arab Office that would serve as their diplomatic arm.

If we begin, in virtual reality, to render partitions as needless, or at best as boundaries for some consensual game, then we have the opportunity to carry that skill over into our day-to-day worlds.

Bissell arranged for a presidential action to add Groom Lake, as the test area was called, into the AEC territory, so that on maps it would just look like more land partitioned off for nuclear tests. The new CIA base—later nicknamed Area 51—was built for a total of eight hundred thousand dollars. “I’ll bet this is one of the best deals the government will ever get,” Johnson observed.

Co-partitioning is related to but distinct from partition co-location. We say that multiple RDDs are co-partitioned if they are partitioned by the same known partitioner.