Popular quotes about India! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 9
If I was asked what is the greatest treasure which India possesses and what is her finest heritage, I would answer unhesitatingly that it is the Samskrit language and literature and all that it contains. This is a magnificent inheritance and so long as this endures and influences the life of our people, so long will the basic genius of India continue. If our race forgot the Buddha, the Upanishads and the great epics (Ramayana and Mahabharata), India would cease to be India .
Jawaharlal NehruToday the world has to accept what India has been saying about terrorism. India's dialogue on terrorism, the losses India has suffered due to terrorism, the losses suffered by humanity, the world is now acknowledging that.
Narendra ModiSo far as we are concerned, there is not one word in the statements that I have made in this council which can be interpreted to mean that we will not honour international obligations. I want to say for the purpose of the record that there is nothing that has been said on behalf of the Government of India which in the slightest degree indicates that the Government of India or the Union of India will dishonour any international obligations it has undertaken.
Arundhati RoyIf anyone thinks Indian Muslims will dance to their tune, they are delusional. Indian Muslims will live for India. They will die for India. They will not want anything bad for India.
Narendra ModiThe thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well. It's amazing how much progress there's been in China, and also India. Those are the places that really matter - they're half of the world's population. They're the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago. And I don't see anything that's going to stop that.
Freeman DysonOut of its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy. Producing too much life, it denied the value of life; yet it permitted a unique human development to so many. Nowhere were people so heightened, rounded and individualistic; nowhere did they offer themselves so fully and with such assurance. To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure. I did not want India to sink [out of my memory]; the mere thought was painful.
V. S. NaipaulIf India won her freedom through truth and non-violence, India would not only point the way to all the exploited Asiatic nations, she would become a torch-bearer for the Negro races.
Mahatma GandhiGandhi wanted to meet with Churchill, his most bitter foe, when he visited London in 1931- but it didn't happen. Churchill wanted to go to India personally as prime minister in 1942 to negotiate a final settlement on India with Gandhi and the other nationalist leaders - but the fall of Singapore prevented it from happening.
Arthur L. HermanIn India and in New York the economy is naked. People are starving physically in India, and emotionally in New York.
Francesco ClementeGod forbid that India should ever become a military nation, which would be a menace to the peace of the world, and yet if things went on as they were doing, what hope was there for India and, therefore, for the world?
Mahatma GandhiThe Golcondas were considered incomparably the best team in Southern India ... [But] we defeated [them] by 9 goals to 3. On succeeding days we made short work of all other opponents, and established the record, never since broken, of winning a first-class tournament within fifty days of landing in India.
Winston ChurchillIt all started in India in the late 60s when I began helping my husband George, who was in the population field, evaluate the introduction of the intrauterine contraceptive device. At that time the IUD was considered to be the panacea for India's population problem. George's dissertation was focused on population and he became interested in the question of this new technology and how people were responding to it.
Ruth SimmonsIndia is one of the youngest startup nations in the world, and so far, various technology startups have witnessed phenomenal growth. It's amazing how these startups are thriving solely based on domestic demands. It speaks volumes about India's economy and its rich talent pool.
Bhavin TurakhiaTheir thought is India is a beehive (Madhumakhi Ka Chhata) but our thought is India is our Mother (Maata). Their thought is poverty is a state of mind, our thought is that the poor are manifestation of Almighty. Their thought is to divide and rule, our thought is to integrate and do development. Their soch is Vanshvaad, our soch is Rashtravaad. They say Rajneeti is everything, we say Rashtraneeti is everything. Your thought is to save the chair, our thought is to save the nation.
Narendra ModiComrades ! You have voluntarily accepted a mission that is the noblest that the human mind can conceive of. For the fulfillment of such a mission no sacrifice is too great, not even the sacrifice of one's life. You are today the custodians of India's national honour and the embodiment of India's hopes and aspirations. So conduct yourself that your countrymen may bless you and posterity may be proud of you.
Subhas Chandra BoseI make no bones about the fact that India matters to me, and I would like to matter to India.
Shashi TharoorMy first intellectual challenge was to try to understand this incredible city of Banaras (also called Varanasi) in India and its meaning for Hindus. That was the place I lived for the first year I was in India and I've been back many times. It's a kind of home to me.
Diana L. EckYou go to India and you see the poorest village somewhere in the middle of India. And the poor family is happier than any rich billionaire in this country because of spirituality.
Marina AbramovicHopefully the presence in Congress of an American who happens to be Hindu will increase America's understanding of India as well as India's understanding of America.
Tulsi GabbardI basically love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that whether it's Indian or it's Western. But in India, I think it's limited to filler music unfortunately. That's one thing I want to push in India where we have the infrastructure of an orchestra where you play Indian melodies with an orchestra and something different for a universal audience. It requires a lot of work from me.
A. R. RahmanWe dream of an India where development is the result of all Chief Ministers, the Prime Minister, state Ministers, Union Ministers working together with even Local Body Authorities as one team, a strong and united Team India.
Narendra ModiIn the south of India, they educated girls. Three things came together in southern India that are unbelievably coincidental. There, the local Maharajas believed in education for everybody. The Syrian Catholic Church built schools for boys and girls. And then the Communist party, which took over politics for a period of time, had very strong social policies that benefited women. As a result, girls got into school. It was the first part of the country where towns could claim to be 100 percent literate. And so there, you're going to have a sex ratio at birth that's normal.
Barbara CrossetteThis is how you falsify reality, ... The problem in India is not the Islamic fundamentalists. It's the Hindu fundamentalists, who will destroy India in the end.
Mahesh BhattI 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.
Indira GandhiIn Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resultedโBalder, Persephoneโbut [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.
E. M. ForsterIndia has seen a dream of Digital India. From latest science to latest technology, everything should be available at the tip of one's finger.
Narendra ModiHe's like one of those weird birds in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I've got a cousin who's what they call a Theosophist, and he says he's often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn't quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.
P. G. WodehouseWhen you think of how much violence, how much blood... how much has been destroyed to create the great nations, America, Australia, Britain, Germany, France, Belgium - even India, Pakistan. Having destroyed so much to make them, we must have nuclear weapons to protect them - and climate change to hold up their way of life... a two-pronged annihilation project.
Arundhati RoyAt the beginning of the 20th century, there were less than 3 billion people on the earth, closer to 2 billion. By all measures that we can come up with right now,. with the lifestyle and consumption pattern of the Western industrial civilization, we can probably sustain about 2 billion people on this earth. We already have over 6 billion. China and India are aspiring to come on as industrial nations, aspiring to the lifestyle of the Western world, and it simply can't happen.
Edgar MitchellWe do not need men and women from other planets to develop India. Our people, our youth are skilled.
Narendra ModiLet America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it.
Herman Melville21st century is the century of knowledge and the world has always looked at India whenever knowledge finds prominence. Emergence of knowledge society is no more a slogan but has become a reality. Knowledge will be the fountainhead of all the activities that happen in human development.
Narendra ModiWhen 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.
Salman RushdieFollowing the devastating India Ocean tsunami of 2004, I founded Chefs for Humanity, modeled after Doctors Without Borders, but comprised of chefs. There wasn't anything out there like it, and there was a definite need for chefs to be able to offer assistance and aid to those suffering from hunger and/or malnutrition worldwide.
Cat CoraSejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirtsโthe sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish.
Adam RexThe extraordinary thing about India is that it's such a family place. It's full of families everywhere.
Danny BoyleThe prosecution of [Warren] Hastings, though he should escape at last, must have good effect. It will alarm the servants of the Company in India, that they may not always plunder with impunity, but that there may be a retrospect; and it will show them that even bribes of diamonds to the Crown may not secure them from prosecution.
Horace WalpoleToo many escape into complexity these days. For it is an escape for persons to cry, when this question of the equality of peoples is raised in India or in our own South, 'Ah, but the situation is not so simple.' ... no great stride forward is ever made for the individual or for the human race unless the complex situation is reduced to one simple question and its simple answer.
Pearl S. BuckWhen I came back to India after Harvard Business School, I started as a lawyer and as a trade union leader.
P. ChidambaramInterestingly, what the bourgeois women's groups in India wanted to do in the nationalist period is to have the peasant women essentially follow them... They would be the leaders and the peasant women would be the masses.
Vijay PrashadChina is a BRIC country. BRIC country means Brazil, Russia, India and China. This emerging economy really is helping the revival of the world economy.
Michael AntiOne of the great ironies is that the impact of the flattening world has not been to empower decentralized rural land, but to strengthen the cities in China and India and elsewhere that are gateways between those countries and the West. It's deeply wise for the Chinese to be pro-urban in terms of development. They're creating space for ideas and human capital to be developed.
Edward Glaeser