ACHIEVEMENT

Life means struggle and the higher you aim, the more you wish to achieve, the greater is the work and sacrifice demanded of you.

ART

What does one seek from art? A few hours of pleasure or an experience which has the seed of timelessness that touches one's innermost self?

BEAUTIFICATION

Some times when I am told that we are beautifying something, I have a sense of horror as to what is going to emerge. And if it is at all my power, I immediately send a message; ‘please just leave it as it is.' How much better nature is than what we can do to it!

CAPACITY

The more one does, the more one attempts, the more one is capable of doing.

CHALLENGES

We have challenges right at our doorsteps. We do not have to go to the mountains or cross the high sea and we have poverty in our villages and we have the caste system in every home. These are the mountains we have to climb, the oceans which we have to cross.

CHANGE

A changing society is not always as well administered as a static society.

Whenever you take a step forward you are bound to disturb something. As you go forward, you disturb the air, you disturb the dust on the ground, you trample upon things.

Thousands of years ago our sages taught us that change is the law of life. They evolved the symbol of the ever-turning wheel to tell us the meaning of Dharma.

CHILDREN

Most people see their children as extensions of themselves, and want to use them for the fulfillment of their own thwarted ambitious.

Children are extraordinarily perceptive and quick to detect any falsehood or pretence.

The children of India are like flowers in a garden. In a garden you cannot postpone the care of any variety. Each has to be looked after simultaneously. There is so much to do.

CIVIL SERVANTS

The duty of civil servants is to give frank and honest advice and not let their judgment be cramped by fear or favour. I certainly do not want civil servants who are in any way servile or politically convenient, because if they were so, they would not be helpful to the Government or the administration.

COEXISTENCE

Our world is small but it has room for all to live together and to improve the quality of the lives of our people in peace and beauty.

On this small planet of ours, there is no room for permanent enmities and irreversible alienations. We have to live side by side.

COLONIALISM

Colonialism is dying but its ghost will haunt the world until political independence is matched by economic viability.

Neo-colonialism comes wrapped in all kinds of packages—in technology and communications, commerce and culture. It takes boldness and integrity to resist it.

CONGRESS

With all my love and pride in the Congress organization, I must say that there is something which is bigger than the Congress, and that is our country and our people. And the day we forget that and talk only about our party, that day will see the weakening of the party.

The Congress party came into being as an instrument of change, to free India from colonial bondage and simultaneously to prepare the ground for bringing economic welfare and social justice to our people. The challenge before the Congress today is to renew itself and to be identified in the people's mind as a party of the future.

The Congress is indeed an unique organization. What has made it so? What marks out the Congress is that from the beginning it has identified itself with the basic problems of our people. We have always stood for democracy, secularism and social justice. These are still our guiding principles.

The party must reflect the popular will and at the same time mould it.

If we take care of work at the grass-roots level, elections will hold no uncertainties.

COMMUNALISM

A person is less that human when he deprives somebody of his rights as citizen only because of his religion.

Communalism, whether it is Hindu or Muslim or Sikh, or of any other religion, is deplorable.

There are political parties which claim to be secular, but the aid and comfort they take from communal parties makes a mockery of their secularism. When milk and poison come together, the poison does not become milky, it is the milk which becomes poisonous.

CONSTITUTION

Our own Constitution has grown out of our experience. In external form it may have incorporated feature from other constitutions, but its breath is that of Mahatma Gandhi, of Gurudev, of Deshbandhu Das, of Jahawarhlal Nehru, of Subhas Bose and of the people of India who aspired for equality and justice.

COUNTINUITY

Continuity is desirable only if it learn not to obstruct change.

COUNTRY

A country is an extended family.

COURAGE

Courage is the very foundation of other virtues.

You have to have courage of different kinds. First, intellectual courage, to sort out different values and make up your mind about which is the one that is right for you to follow. You have to have moral courage then to stick to that—no matter what the obstacle and the opposition is. You have to have physical courage, because very often going the path of your choice is full of physical hardship.

DEVOLOPEMENT

Development is not merely economic or material, but something much wider, encompassing all aspects of our universe and of the human personality, no less than the environment.

DEATH

I do not care whether I live or die. I have lived a long life and as long as there is breath in me, my life will be spent in service. And when I die, I can say that every drop of my blood will keep India alive and strengthen it.

If I die a violent death, as some fear and a few are plotting, I know the violence will be in the thought and action of the assassin, not in my dying, for no hate is dark enough to overshadow the extent of my love for my people and my country; no force is strong enough to divert me from my purpose and my endeavor to take this country forward.

Personally, I would like to die like Gandhiji—suddenly, not after a prolonged illness—for I know how my father suffered during his life-and-death struggle.

DEMOCRACY

Democracy implies acceptance of certain higher norms. The government can be opposed, but not national interest. Democratic liberty does not include the license to undermine democracy itself.

Tolerance and discipline are the very foundation of democracy.

Any encouragement to religious fanaticism is an intolerable affront to democracy.

Democracy cannot strike deep roots unless disparities between the rich and the poor are reduced.

The interests of the people are best safeguarded in a democracy, because democracy is perhaps the only system which strengthens the people themselves.

ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT

One cannot be truly human and civilized unless on looks upon not only all fellow men but all creation with the eyes of a friend.

The aim of the World Conservation Strategy should be to ensure that every man, woman and child on earth has fingers that will grown rather than grab things.

Today it is not the ignorant but the knowing who pose the main danger to humankind's survival.

Will the growing awareness of ‘One Earth' and ‘One Environment' guide us to the concept of ‘One Humanity'?

We must re-establish the sacred dimension that views the resources of the world as a common heritage, to nurture and to use frugally.

THE EARTH

Our small Earth is a modest satellite of a minor star. Yet it is the cradle of two miracles, life and the mind, from which other miracles have sprung. Today it is threatened by its own creations and desires.

With the arrogance that comes from increasing knowledge and capacity, man has ignored his dependence on the Earth and has lost his communion with it. He no longer puts his ear to the ground so that the Earth can whisper its secrets to him.

EDUCATION

Education is not just knowing something more but becoming something better.

True education is such as will give you the capacity to keep on learning from all your experience.

A country's human resources constitute its greatest asset. Attitudes and skills make a nation. Education provides the key to both.

EPICS

The stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have been a kind of Open University, quickening our people's sense of right and wrong, and endowing them with examples with whom they can identify, and which enlarge their moral sense.

EXCELLENCE

Excellence does not necessarily mean doing extraordinary things. It is judged equally by doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

FAMILH PLANNING

The aim of family planning is to restore joy to motherhood, and to make every child a wanted child, with a fair chance of health, education and employment.

Like all burdens, that of increasing population falls on the poor, narrowing their range of choice.

FARMING

In a country where half of the national income comes from farming, agricultural self-reliance is the basis of all self-reliance.

FREEDOM

Freedom is that which helps us to break out of the confines of fear and hate, of chauvinism and obscurantism and the shackles of dead habit. Freedom is the atmosphere which enables each individual to grow to his full height. This is the freedom for which we must strive.

The struggle for freedom began when the first man was enslaved and it will continue until the last man is free—not merely from visible bondage, but of the concepts of inferiority due to race, colour, caste or sex.

Freedom has often meant freedom for the big against the small.

GRAND CHILDREN

If I am with them I have the time, provided they have the time. You know, children are very busy people.

GANDHIJI

Gandhiji rejected the politics of the elite and found the key to mass action. He was a leader in tune with the mass mind, interpreting it and at the same time moulding it. He was the crest of the wave but they, the people, were themselves the wave.

Mahatma Gandhi was the first person who thought of women as political beings.

Gandhi is known as the father of the nation. Each person's understanding of Gandhi is a measure of his own development. He transformed the cowed and the meek into a nation which fearlessly asserted its right to be free. All religions have spoken of truth and peace, but it was Gandhi's genius to use these as tools in our struggle for independence.

GREATNESS

We should not be interested in the greatness of an individual but in the greatness of the country.

The greatness for which we strive is not the arrogance of military power or the avarice of economic exploitation. It is the true greatness of the spirit which India has cherished through the millennia.

HAPPINESS

Happiness is giving of your best to something you believe in.

Happiness is not in dreams, but in the life we lead.

Happiness comes when you know you are doing the right thing, that you are devoting yourself to a cause bigger than yourself, that you are doing something that will bring some solace and succour to others.

HARTED

Do not shed blood, shed hatred.

HIMALAYAS

Once they defended us; now we must defend them.

HERSELF

I have always considered myself a desh sevika

Politics is not a career for me. It is a service.

I have many faults. But panic and fear do not belong to my character. Whatever I do, I do very calmly and coolly, after giving it serious thought. There are moments to be excited, but at the time of decision one has to be cool-headed.

My strength comes from the people's closeness to me. The people feel I listen to them. Now, an authoritarian person would not do that.

When I was young I rarely had time to sit back and plan a role for myself.

I never wanted to go into politics. But such were the days that everybody put the country first and himself next. Left to myself, I might have been an archaeologist, a writer, or possibly a student of folk arts and customs.

HUMANITY

Born of the Universe, we cannot narrow our loyalties. Belonging to humankind, nothing human can be alien to us.

INNER ENERGY

I was asked when I went to our nuclear installation in Bombay . ‘Where do you get your energy from?' I said, ‘Well, it is nuclear energy. You have it outside and all of us have it inside. You must learn to use what is inside you.'

INDIA

I cannot understand how anyone can be an Indian and not be proud.

To me, all parts of India are equidistant from Delhi .

The vision I have of the new India is of a mighty nation, bursting forth with energy—providing a better life for its people, committed to the humaneness of man, busying itself with the great acts of peace. In my view, all turbulence must end in order, all conflict in resolution, and all travail in peace.