India Quotes

You put cow dung on my face?’ ‘Every day religiously until you were three. Why else do you think your skin is so clear?

We must also remember that in every little village-god and every little superstitious custom is that which we are accustomed to call our religious faith. But local customs are infinite and contradictory. Which are we to obey, and which not to obey? The Brāhmin of Southern India, for instance, would shrink in horror at the sight of another Brahmin eating meat; a Brahmin in the North thinks it a most glorious and holy thing to do—he kills goats by the hundred in sacrifice. If you put forward your custom, they are equally ready with theirs. Various are the customs all over India, but they are local. The greatest mistake made is that ignorant people always think that this local custom is the essence of our religion.

Swami Vivekananda

I thought about my [Punjabi] family. The only nakshatram we think about is the division of petrol pumps when we have to see the girl.

Chetan Bhagat

The main goal of the regulatory policy has been to control the size of Mumbai by penalizing any new development, fearing that economic success would attract more people.’ Yes, we have deliberately planned for our cities to fail. That has been our intent. If they succeed, then more people would move there, ‘who would have to share an already deficient and immutable infrastructure’. Bertaud concludes: ‘This is a very pessimistic view of urban development.' An understatement, so classically French!

Mihir S. Sharma

Most people around here prefer undead drivers, so I never get a chance to make any money on steady contracts.

T.K. Naliaka

Marble flooring is to a Punjabi what a foreign degree is to a Tamilian

Chetan Bhagat

She is too intelligent to be a good daughter-in-law

Chetan Bhagat

If the war had a noble purpose, it was this - to end the inhumanity those photographs showed. While India rarely spoke about its imperative as the moral one, and few people steeped in realpolitik can shed their cynicism when a politician speaks in moral terms, and the intervention certainly suited India's strategic interests, the fact remains that in the annals of humanitarian interventions, few were as swift, successful, purpose-driven and with humanitarian goals as the Indian intervention to liberate Bangladesh. India went in when it was attacked, and left before its troops became unpopular.

Salil Tripathi

The overload of useless ceremonials and worship have crippled the whole nation. If you want to do good to your nation and yourself, then throw away your ancient ceremonials as far as possible.

Abhijit Naskar

All of his (Nanak's) progressive thinking attained absolution at the age of 30, when he had the transcendental experience, quite similar to that of Mohammed and Joan of Arc, that was about to rock the very foundation of orthodox Hinduism in India.

Abhijit Naskar

To the traditional Indians, terms such as “intercourse”, “penis”, “vagina”, “clitoris”, “semen”, “masturbation”, “breasts”, etc. are exclusive possessions of the night. The traditional Indians perceive these terms as something “dirty”. No matter how old they look, they really never grow up to talk and discuss about sex.

Abhijit Naskar

Fill this city of mine with people as,You filled the river with fishes O Lord.

Quli Qutub Shah

He could not help but admire his posters every time he saw them---the son of a rickshaw puller, now the chief of a prominent political party in this town, who was expected to win by an unprecedented margin of votes in the coming elections. There were many people in the party who begrudged his presence, his power, but they could do nothing. The people of Amrapur loved him and his speeches. Some people called them inflammatory, divisive, and harmful to the peace and harmony of the town. A smile spread across his face every time he heard that word. Has anything ever been achieved by harmony? What would the leaders do with harmony? Why would people come to listen to his speeches in droves if they wanted harmony? Elections can never be won by harmony.

Rohit Gore

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

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

Virchand Gandhi

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

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

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

Sumit Agarwal

I fought to stay awake and keep the car on the road. And I thought back to texts I had read from the British Army in India, during the Raj, at the height of their empire. Young subalterns trapped in junior ranks had their own mess. They would dine together in splendid dress uniforms and talk about their chances of promotion. But they had none, unless a superior officer died. Dead men's shoes was the rule. So they would raise their crystal glasses of fine French wine and toast "bloody wars and dread diseases" because a casualty further up the chain of command was their only way to get ahead. Brutal, but that's how it's always been, in the military.

Lee Child

The biggest irony in the history of India is the term, "Muslim Personal Law."Law of the land could never be personal.

Ketan Waghmare

The American people spend thousands of dollars to propagate the doctrines of the fall of man, the creation of the world out of nothing in six days by a personal God, vicarious atonement, absolution from sin by the shedding of innocent blood. This is the Christianity offered to the poor and illiterate of India...Christianity has percolated through the layers of dogmatism and bigotry, of intolerance and superstition, of damnation and hell fire. It takes on itself the quality of these layers and imparts them to those that are received within its folds.

Virchand Gandhi

We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn't as if the entire world is intermeshed with each other. It's not like India and Thailand or India and Korea or India and Turkey are connected. It's more like America is the hub of this huge cultural and economic airline system. It's the nodal point. Everyone has to be connected through America, and to some extent Europe.When powers at the hub of the global economy decide that you have to be X or Y, then if you're part of that network, you have to do it. You don't have the independence of being nonaligned in some way, politically or culturally or economically. If America goes down, then everybody goes down. If tomorrow the United States decides that it wants these call center jobs back, then overnight this billion-dollar industry will collapse in India. It's important for countries to develop a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. Just in a theoretical sense, it's important for everybody not to have their arms wrapped around each other or their fingers wrapped around each others' throats at all times, in all kinds of ways.

Arundhati Roy

Christian missions to India imply that India is a land of heathens, and, therefore, stands on the same level with the Andaman or the Fiji Islands. That a country which has been recognised in all ages the world over as the mother of all religions and the cradle of civilisation should be considered as pagan, shows how much ignorance prevails in Christendom. Since the Parliament of Religions, I have been studying Christian institutions, and I have also studied the way in which the Christian ministers and the missionaries are manufactured in this country, and have learned to pity them. We must not blame them too severely, because their education is too narrow to make them broad-minded. I grant that they are good-hearted, that they are good husbands and often fathers of large families, but generally they are very ignorant, especially of the history of civilisation and of the philosophy of religion of India. Most of them do not even know the history of ancient India.We know that in this age of competition, centralisation, and monopoly, very many people are forced out of business. The English say, 'The fool of the family goes into the Church'; so that when a youth is unable to make a living, he takes to missionary work, goes to India, and helps to introduce among the Hindus the doctrines of his church, which have long since been exploded by science.

Virchand Gandhi

Democracy is probably the only discovery by mankind which mostly brought it only happiness.

Amit Kalantri

We both disliked rude rickshwalas, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who'd just smoked a cigarette et cetra. Another list. The things we loved: strong coffee, Matisse, Rumi, summer rain, bathing together, Tom Hanks, rice pancakes, Cafe Sunrise, black-and-white photographs, the first quiet moments after you wake up in the morning.

Sachin Kundalkar

Until she went with him to India the first time after they were married. Then it all made sense, and she realized that the hospitality he displayed to all guests was larger than he was - it was cultural, hereditary, something coded into his DNA.

Thrity Umrigar

...if we were to associate the genius of a place with one particular thing – the Russians with literature, say, or the Germans with music, the Dutch and Spanish with painting – we would have to say that the true genius of Ancient India was language.

Aatish Taseer

A country as such does not be good or bad, only the people are good or bad, that too change by generations and this scenario is same to any nations. what India really have is a rich legacy.. nothing else

Rajesh Nanoo

In Networking never underestimate anyones connection potential. Sometimes even a small office helper can connect you to the Business Owner !

Sampath K. Iyengar

Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but the Muslim Ideology which has to be preserved, which has come to us as a precious gift and treasure and which, we hope other will share with us.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Some Christian lawyers—some eminent and stupid judges—have said and still say, that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law.Nothing could be more absurd. Long before these commandments were given there were codes of laws in India and Egypt—laws against murder, perjury, larceny, adultery and fraud. Such laws are as old as human society; as old as the love of life; as old as industry; as the idea of prosperity; as old as human love.All of the Ten Commandments that are good were old; all that were new are foolish. If Jehovah had been civilized he would have left out the commandment about keeping the Sabbath, and in its place would have said: 'Thou shalt not enslave thy fellow-men.' He would have omitted the one about swearing, and said: 'The man shall have but one wife, and the woman but one husband.' He would have left out the one about graven images, and in its stead would have said: 'Thou shalt not wage wars of extermination, and thou shalt not unsheathe the sword except in self-defence.'If Jehovah had been civilized, how much grander the Ten Commandments would have been.All that we call progress—the enfranchisement of man, of labor, the substitution of imprisonment for death, of fine for imprisonment, the destruction of polygamy, the establishing of free speech, of the rights of conscience; in short, all that has tended to the development and civilization of man; all the results of investigation, observation, experience and free thought; all that man has accomplished for the benefit of man since the close of the Dark Ages—has been done in spite of the Old Testament.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Independence means.. enjoying freedom and empowering others too to let them do so.

Vikrmn

Whatever happens, happens for the best.' That's how any domestic counselling starts in a Marathi family. Everyone in every family has an inner psychiatrist who rises to the occasion with some home-made mottos, a few lines from Jagjit Singh ghazal. An older generation may quote Tukaram but underlying all this is the bedrock phase: Whatever happens, happens for the best.

Sachin Kundalkar

Brahma and AiravataLong ago in lands of golden sandBrahma turned to Saraswatiand gently kissed her inked hand....

Muse

But Khair did not need such proof of her husband's love for her. Over and over again,James had risked everything for her. Most relationships in life can survive - or not - without being put to any really crucial, fundamental test. It was James's fate for his love to be tested not once, but four times....At each stage he could easily have washed his hands off his teenage lover. Each time he chose to remain true to her.That, not the words of any will, was the evidence she could cling onto.

William Dalrymple

We should have realized it sooner, at least my father should have, that there was no coming back. Not in September when the riots died down, not in October when the subcontinent still lay in shock, not even in November as he had hoped and promised us. Lahore was now lost forever

Aanchal Malhotra

The 'Renaissance' West Butchered the Rest.If I had to choose between an erudite Aristotle and an unknown ‘soulless’ black slave I would choose the latter. The ascendancy of the West was on a heap of bodies of slaves and trampled humanity through colonization

Viktor Vijay Kumar

Anything Freed with Guns will Go Back Eventually.

Vineet Raj Kapoor

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere.2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times....3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occa

Christopher Hitchens

A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

George Orwell

Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

Mahatma Gandhi

The most dangerous people in the world are not the tiny minority instigating evil acts, but those who do the acts for them – for a paycheck. To act without a conscience, but for a paycheck, makes anyone a dangerous animal. The devil would be powerless if he couldn’t entice people to do his work. So as long as money continues to seduce the hungry, the hopeless, the broken, the greedy, and the needy, there will always be war between people.

Suzy Kassem

It is all about the trade of ignorance. And India is such a bronze-age nation that is filled with these trades (astrology, palm reading, vastushashtra and others).

Abhijit Naskar

It is all about the trade of ignorance. And India is such a bronze-age nation that is filled with these trades (astrology, palm reading, vastushashtra and others).

Abhijit Naskar

...wearing a turban of yellow, signifying knowledge, and a robe of purple, portraying purity and activity, Virchand Gandhi of Bombay delivered a lecture on the religions of India....

The New York Times

A JEWELRY STORE NAMED INDIAIf you hold this Dazzling emeraldUp to the sky,It will shine a billion Beautiful miraclesPainted from the tearsOf the Most High.Plucked from the lush gardensOf a yellowish-green paradise,Look inside this hypnotic gemAnd a kaleidoscope of Titillating, Soul-raising Sights and colorsWill tease and seduceYour eyes and mind.Tell me, sir.Have you ever heardA peacock sing?Hold your earTo this mystical stoneAnd you will hearSacred hymns flowingTo the vibrationsOf the perfumedWind.

Suzy Kassem

Uniform of a soldier and uniform of a student both are equally needed for the nation.

Amit Kalantri

You can take the Indian out of the family, but you cannot take the family out of the Indian.

Amit Kalantri

In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.

Amit Kalantri

State first, subject second, statesman last.

Amit Kalantri

India Quotes

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