India Quotes

Based on our badly borrowed misunderstanding of the words ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’ we seemto have become blinded by the dominant intellectual ideology of our times, according to which schools as secular organizations are supposed to not have anything to do with matters of the spirit. Education has, therefore, become concerned only with matters of material life (eventually leading to commodification)... This dichotomy between 'education for social success' and education for spirit' must go if we want to make Indian Education more relevant for the future of India. Education needs to become more integral, more complete through a meaningful synthesis of the two.

~ Beloo Mehra

It is as if we were to start hacking a path through the Amazon forest. By the time we have proceeded a hundred yards, the undergrowth takes over again.

~ Edward Luce

This is the kind of corruption we understand, the corruption of the petty clerk writ large, and so this is the kind of corruption we look for. This is the kind of guilt we expect and understand: personal, targeted, involving suitcases. We really need suitcases.

~ Mihir S. Sharma

We know we are all tarnished, so we doubt everyone else too. It is sad situation, where we need a leader but cannot really trust anyone.

~ Chetan Bhagat

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Patriotism means to stand by the people, not to stand by the party.

~ Sumit Agarwal

We are not killing, we are saving.......a billion dreams.

~ Sumit Agarwal

Nation has to be proud of itself to move forward.It should be clear that as long as India does not stand-up, there will be no peace in Asia.

~ Vikram Singh Slathia

I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon.

~ Abraham Verghese

Give up the idea that by ruling over others you can do any good to them. But you can do just as much as you can in the case of the plant: you can supply the growing seed with the materials for the making up of its body, bringing to it the earth, the water, the air, that it wants. It will take all that it wants by its own nature, it will assimilate and grow by its own nature.

~ Swami Vivekananda

What if you get a virgin (or what you call – pure) girl, and she disrespects you, has affairs outside, insults your parents and becomes a bitch after marriage? And what if the girl isn’t virgin, but she’s pure-hearted, loves and cares for you, respects your parents, is true to you and remains by your side for the rest of your life? What will matter more? Her virginity, or her nature?

~ Mehek Bassi

Gandhi sacrificed India for his own fame and recognition. Without Gandhi, there would have been a different India; a very masculine one.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

The ultimate goal of human life is to transcend culture and personality to the unconditioned pure being. But the means to do this is through our culture and way of life.

~ David Frawley

Ammu's tears made everything that had so far seemed unreal, real.

~ Arundhati Roy

Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.

~ Gregory David Roberts

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

~ Coco Chanel

India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.

~ Shashi Tharoor

Indians are the Italians of Asia and vice versa. Every man in both countries is a singer when he is happy, and every woman is a dancer when she walks to the shop at the corner. For them, food is the music inside the body and music is the food inside the heart. Amore or Pyar makes every man a poet, a princess of peasant girl if only for second eyes of man and woman meets.

~ Gregory David Roberts

Go to Old Delhi,and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them.They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with humans in this country.

~ Aravind Adiga

When we choose a mobile network, do we check whether Airtel or Vodafone belong to a particular caste? No, we simply choose the provider based on the best value or service. Then why do we vote for somebody simply because he belongs to the same caste as us?

~ Chetan Bhagat

India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.

~ William Dalrymple

If I find the constitution being misused, I shall be the first to burn it.

~ B.r. Ambedkar

I do not want that our loyalty as Indians should be in the slightest way affected by any competitive loyalty whether that loyalty arises out of our religion, out of our culture or out of our language. I want all people to be Indians first, Indian last and nothing else but Indians.

~ B.r. Ambedkar

These stupid biases and discrimination are the reason our country is so screwed up. It's Tamil first, Indian later. Punjabi first, Indian later. It has to end. National anthem, national currency, national teams - still, we won't marry our children outside our state. How can this intolerance be good for our country?

~ Chetan Bhagat

Far from marking the end of nationalism, the IPL is the ultimate triumph of that principle: a global tournament in which the same nation always wins.

~ Gideon Haigh

She liked the way a ray of mild autumn sun infiltrating the thick cluster of trees caught a reddish orange leaf swirling in the wind and transformed it golden yellow. She liked that it wasn’t a leaf she recognised, that she could name or associate with her past.

~ Renita D'silva

India is not a nation, nor a country. It is a subcontinent of nationalities.

~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Any idea of a United India could never have worked and in my judgment it would have led us to terrific disaster.

~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

…the designation of wife in India, of the Hindu wife, is higher and grander than that of Empress. She is called Devi

~ Virchand Gandhi

In India even the most mundane inquiries have a habit of ending this way. There may be two answers, there may be five, a dozen or a hundred; the only thing that is certain is that all will be different.

~ Eric Newby

India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination.

~ Thrity Umrigar

Living in a small town [in India] was like living in a glass house!

~ Mallika Nawal

And Englishmen like posing as gods.

~ E.m. Forster

In international commerce, India is an ancient country-(19th October, 1899)

~ Virchand Gandhi

Ohh,' said the girl with a sad tilt of her

~ Adam Rex

What is done cannot be undone,Knowing that, face it but do not run.

~ Rupansh Gupta

Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time!

~ Salman Rushdie

Krishna taught in the Bhadavad Gita: ‘karmanyeva-adhikaraste ma phalesu kadachana’, which means, ‘Be active, never be inactive, and don’t react to the outcome of the work.

~ Anonymous

Indian food is like classical music raga- it takes time to build up to a crescendo.

~ Shobhaa Dé

Even as I took a long, hard look at some of the obvious downsides (Q: 'What are the three things keeping India down? A: Corruption, corruption and corruption.'), I still felt the upsides (Q: 'What is so fantastic about the India story? A: People, people and people.') tilted the scales in our favor.

~ Shobhaa Dé