[Visiting Richard Nixon] useful only to me. The experience taught me that when people do something against you, that something always turns out in your favor.

I don't at all care who's on the right or left or in the center. Even though we use them, even though I use them myself, these expressions have lost all meaning.

I always defended my father, as a child, and I think I'm still defending him - his policies at least. Oh, he wasn't at all a politician, in no sense of the word. He was sustained in his work only by a blind faith in India - he was preoccupied in such an obsessive way by the future of India. We understood each other.

To me the function of politics is to make possible the desirable.

I always stayed married to my husband! Always, until the day he died! It's not true that we were separated!

When I'm not governing my country any more, I'll go back to taking care of children. Or else I'll start studying anthropology - it's a science that's always interested me very much, also in relation to the problem of poverty. Or else I'll go back to studying history - at Oxford I took my degree in history. Or else...I don't know, I'm fascinated by the tribal communities. I might busy myself with them.

In an underdeveloped society, the first anxiety is of infant mortality. In an advanced one it is to keep alive the aged.