With boys I climbed trees, ran races, and wrestled. I had no complexes of envy or inferiority toward boys. At the same time, however, I liked dolls.

in today's world no country can be absolutely independent of another. It is a world of interdependence.

People with clenched fists can not shake hands.

I have certain objectives. They're the same objectives my father had to give people a higher standard of living, to do away with the cancer of poverty, to eliminate the consequences of economic backwardness.

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.

Every new experience brings its own maturity and a greater clarity of vision.

How can anybody who is the head of a nation afford not to be a prag-matist?