Gems Collected by Shaheed Bhagat Singh in Jail

Bhagat Singh, a great reader and thinker was able to break the jail conditions, even when officially not allowed he was reading and writing but finally after long hunger strike got the right of reading & writing included in Jail Manuals Thus he maintained a note book of 404 pages and kept notes & quotes from the books he read. Here are few of these:

"Ah my beloved, fill the cup that clears
Todays of past Regrets and future Fears
Tomorrow? _ why, Tomorrow I may be
Myself with yesterdays Sevn's thousand year."
***
Here with a loaf Bread beneath the Bough
A flask of wine, a Book of verse-and thou
Beside me signing in the widerness
And wilderness in paradise now!
"Ummar Khayyam" Natural and Civil Rights
Man did not enter into society to become worse then he was before, but to have those rights better secured. His netural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights.
Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence (intellectual mental etc.)
Civil rights are those that appertain to man in right of his being a member of society.
Rights of Man-Thomas Paine

Morality
"Morality and religion are but words to him who fishes in gutters for the means of sustaining life and crouches behind barrels in the street for shelter from the cutting blasts of a winter night."

Right of labour
We consider it horrible that people should have their heads cut off, but we have not been taught to see the horror of life - long death which is inflicted upon a whole population by poverty and tyranny.
- Mark Twain

The Old labourer
"….He (the old labourer out of employment) was struggling against age, against nature, against circumstences, The entire weight of society, law and order pressed upon him to force him to loose his self respect and liberty.. He knocked at the doors of the farms and found good in man only - not in law and order, but in individual man alone.
-Richerd Jefferies.

Free Thought
"If there is anything that cannot bear free thought, let it crack"
-Windell Phillips

One Against All
(Charles Fourier 1772-1837)
The present social order is a ridiculous mechanism, in which portion of the whole are in conflict and acting against the whole are in conflict and acting against the whole. We see each class in society desire, from interest, the misfortune of the other classes, placing in every way individual interest in opposition to public good. The lawyer wishes litigation and suits. Particularity among the rich; the physician desires sickness (The leter would be ruined if every body died without disease as would The former if all quarrels were settled by arbitration) The soldier wants a war which will carry off half of his burrials; monopolist and forestallers went famine, to double or treble the price of grain; the architect, the carpenter, the mason want conflagration, That will burn down a hundred houses to give activity to their branches of business.

Liberty
Not a grave for the murder'd for freedom, But grow seeds for freedom, in its turn to bearseeds Which the wind carry a far and resow, and the rains and the snows nourish. Not a disembodies spirit can the weapons of tyrant let loose
But it stalc invincible over the earth whispering counselling, cautioning.
-(Walt Whitmen)

Will of Revolutionary
" I also wish my friends to speak little or not at all about me, because idols are created when men are praised and this is very bad for the future of the human race…..Acts alone, no metter by whom committed out to be studied, praised or blamed. Let them be praised in order that they may be initiated when they seem to contribute to the common weal; let them be ceusured when they are regarded as injurious to the general well being, so that they may not be repeated."
"I desire that on no occasion, whether near or remote, nor for any reason whatsoever, shall demonstrations of a political or religious character be made before my remains as I consider the time devoted to the dead would be better employed in improving the conditions of the living, most of whom stand in great need of this."
Will of Frenscisco Ferrer Spanish educator (1859-1909)

Glory of the Cause
Ah! Not for idle hatred, not
For honour, fame, nor self applause
But for the glory of the cause
You did, what will not be forgot
- (Arthur clough)
The mechine is social in nature, as the tool was individual
***
"Give us worse cotton, but give us better men" say Emerson
"Deliver me those rickety perishing souls of infants, and let the cotton trade take its chance."

The men cannot be sacrificed to the machine. The machine must serve mankind, yet the danger to the human race lurks, menacing, in the industrial region
- Poverty & Riches Scott Nearing

Man and Mankind
"I am a man and all that affects manking concerns me"
- (Page 43 of Jail notebook)

Aim of life
"The aim of life is no more to control mind, but to develop it harmoniously, not to achieve salvation here after, but to make the best use of it here below, and not to realise truth, beauty and good only in contemplation, but also in-the actual experience of daily life; social progress depends not upon the ennoblement of the few but on the enrichment democracy or universal brotherhod can be achieved only when there is an equality of opportunity of opportunity in the social, political and individual life." (Page 124 of Jail notebook)