Gandhi Quotes

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?"

[To the Women of India (Young India, Oct. 4, 1930)]”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“When every hope is gone, 'when helpers fail and comforts flee,' I find that help arrives somehow, from I know not where. Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else is unreal.”
― Mahatma Gandhi , Gandhi: An Autobiography

“What barrier is there that love cannot break?”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi: An Autobiography

“The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of truth.”
― Mahatma Gandhi , Gandhi: An Autobiography

“I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.”
― Albert Einstein

“If I were a dictator, religion and state would be separate. I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The state has nothing to do with it. The state would look after your secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your or my religion. That is everybody's personal concern!”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Violence begins with the fork.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach that Gandhi is advocating.”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“Everywhere we walked we got plenty of attention due to the camera and sound men. The locals love to get on camera. [...] I'd seen footage of Gandhi surrounded like this and always thought it was because he was very popular, but now I wonder if it was just because he had a camera crew with him.”
― Karl Pilkington, An Idiot Abroad: The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington

“On Gandhi: Don’t ever forget, that we were not lead by a saint with his head in clouds, but by a master tactician with his feet on the ground.”
― Shashi Tharoor

“I can retain neither respect nor affection for government which has been moving from wrong to wrong in order to defend its immorality”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.”
― Paul Farmer

“Go to the tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop - men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still "boys." But that is your fate if you do your job well - with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

“My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Be kind. It will reveal your true inner beauty.”
― Debasish Mridha

“Don’t think about the possibilities of failing. Never forget to think about the possibilities of flying.”
― Debasish Mridha

“I want to paint the rest of my days with the best colors.”
― Debasish Mridha

“In the very first month of Indian Opinion, I realized that the sole aim of journalism should be service. The newspaper press is a great power, but just as an unchained torrent of water submerges whole countrysides and devastates crops, even so an uncontrolled pen serves but to destroy. If the control is from without, it proves more poisonous than want of control. It can be profitable only when exercised from within. If this line of reasoning is correct, how many of the journals in the world would stand the test? But who would stop those that are useless? And who should be the judge? The useful and the useless must, like good and evil generally, go on together, and man must make his choice.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi: An Autobiography

“...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....”
― New York Times

“Photographs are the reflection of untold stories, unseen beauties, unexpressed emotions, and the unheard songs of life.”
― Debasish Mridha

“Appreciation has tremendous power. A beautiful thing is not beautiful until someone appreciates it.”
― Debasish Mridha

“If you have no inner peace of mind, it is futile to seek peace outside.”
― Debasish Mridha

“La règle d'or de la conduite est la tolérance mutuelle, car nous ne penserons jamais tous de la même façon, nous ne verrons qu'une partie de la vérité et sous des angles différents.”
― Gandhi

“La vie est un mystère qu'il faut vivre, et non un problème à résoudre.”
― Gandhi

“He shrank from even the smallest things that inclined towards self indulgence. He would not remain alone with a lady.

{On Jain scholar Virchand Gandhi}”
― Moncure Daniel Conway, My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East

“You can’t be a great human being when you enjoy killing innocent and helpless animals with a gun just for fun.”
― Debasish Mridha

“From the beginning a basic philosophy guided the movement. This guiding principle has since been referred to variously as nonviolent resistance, noncoöperation, and passive resistance. But in the first days of the protest none of these expressions was mentioned; the phrase most often heard was "Christian love." It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than a doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action. It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love.

As the days unfolded, however, the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi began to exert its influence. I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

“Love, for Gandhi, was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking for so many months. The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social-contracts theory of Hobbes, the “back to nature” optimism of Rousseau, the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

“My study of Gandhi convinced me that true pacifism is not nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil. Between the two positions, there is a world of difference. Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister, but he resisted with love instead of hate. True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power, as [Reinhold] Niebuhr contends. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story