Never forget that when we are silent, we are one. And when we speak we are two.

I want to succeed. And I want to succeed in the best way possible, without caring whether people call my actions leftist or rightist.

Until I was about eighteen, yes [I didn't want to get married]. But not because I felt like a suffragette, but because I wanted to devote all my energies to the struggle to free India. Marriage, I thought, would have distracted me from the duties I'd imposed on myself.

When [my father] asked me to help him, I really didn't suspect the consequences.

Peace we want because there is another war to fight against poverty, disease and ignorance.

The Indians and Pakistanis are literally brothers.

India had barely become independent, in 1947, when Pakistan invaded Kashmir, which at the time was ruled by a maharajah. The maharajah fled, and the people of Kashmir, led by Sheikh Abdullah, asked for Indian help. Lord [Louis] Mountbatten, who was still governor general, replied that he wouldn't be able to supply aid to Kashmir unless Pakistan declared war, and he didn't seem bothered by the fact that the Pakistanis were slaughtering the population.