There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape.

The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.

Journalism is an extraordinary and terrible privilege. Not by chance, if you are aware of it, does it consume you with a hundred feelings of inadequacy. Not by chance, when I find myself going through an event or an important encounter, does it seize me like anguish, a fear of not having enough eyes and enough ears and enough brains to look and listen and understand like a worm hidden in the wood of history.

You wear yourself out in the pursuit of wealth or love or freedom, you do everything to gain some right, and once it's gained you take no pleasure in it.

[Indira Gandhi] looked tired that day, and all of a sudden I exclaimed, 'Deep down I don't envy you, and I shouldn't like to be in your place.' And she said, 'The problem is not in the problems I have, it's in the idiots around me. Democracy, you know...' I now wonder what she meant by that unfinished phrase.

Sometimes I ask myself whether [Indira Gandhi] had, even then, a certain contempt for the system she represented and, years later, would overthrow.

I am a danger to myself if I get angry.