I know I'll astonish everyone by talking like this, but it's God's truth. Honors have never tempted me and I've never sought them.

If you only knew, for instance, how much I enjoy being a grandmother! Do you know I'm twice a grandmother? Rajiv and Sonia have had a boy and a girl.

Mahatma Gandhi was always talking of religion...He was convinced that was right...The fact is, we young people didn't agree with him on many things.

A nation' s strength ultimately consists in what it can do on its own, and not in what it can borrow from others.

In India you don't find propaganda against Pakistan. During the war there was a little of it, naturally, but even during the war we were able to control it. In fact the Pakistanis were astonished by this. There were prisoners in the camp hospitals who exclaimed, 'What? You're a Hindu doctor and you want to cure me?'

Poverty assumes so many aspects here in India. There aren't only the poor that you see in the cities, there are the poor among the tribes, the poor who live in the forest, the poor who live on the mountains. Should we ignore them as long as the poor in the cities are better off? And better off with reference to what? To what people wanted ten years ago? Then it seemed like so much. Today it's no longer so much.

When I was young, I was very selfish, now not any more.