Best Indian Political Quotes & Sayings

It is simply not true that "religion" is always aggressive. Sometimes it has actually put a brake on violence. In the ninth century BCE, Indian ritualists extracted all violence from the liturgy and created the ideal of ahimsa, "nonviolence." The medieval Peace and Truce of God forced knights to stop terrorizing the poor and outlawed violence from Wednesday to Sunday each week. Most dramatically, after the Bar Kokhba war, the rabbis reinterpreted the scriptures so effectively that Jews refrained from political aggression for a millennium. Such successes have been rare. Because of the inherent violence of the states in which we live, the best that prophets and sages have been able to do is provide an alternative. — Karen Armstrong

The entire political elite has mismanaged the Indian economy for the last 50 years. You cannot solve a crisis that is borne as a symptom of mismanagement in just five minutes or in a week. It will involve significant sacrifices and pain, and I doubt that in India there is the political will to face the music. — Marc Faber

Patriotism means to stand by the people, not to stand by the party. — Sumit Agarwal

I think that white women are more apt to read laterally. So I think there's some strong identification for women, and their political and social positions, and minorities. I think that the political power of, let's say, the average Indian man and a white woman are pretty equal. — Sherman Alexie

Thus the terrible insurrection was crushed. Tantia Topee, betrayed by his lieutenant Man-Singh, and condemned to death, was executed on the 15th of April, at Sipfee. This rebel, "this truly remarkable actor in the great drama of the Indian insurrection," says M. de Valbezen, "and one who gave proofs of a political genius full of resources and daring," died courageously on the scaffold. This — Jules Verne

Power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters; all Indian leaders will be of low calibre & men of straw. They will have sweet tongues & silly hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power & India will be lost in political squabbles. A day would come when even air & water would be taxed in India. — Winston Churchill

There have been players with Indian heritage, but there hasn't been a Native-American professional basketball player who became a regular for all sorts of social and political reasons. — Sherman Alexie

Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That's not to say I don't respect them, Mr. Premier! Don't you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time. — Aravind Adiga

I don't think one party has a bad vision over the other party. I have no doubts that every Indian and every Indian political leadership would like to see this country get to a much better level. We would all like to see inclusive growth. — Baba Kalyani

The Saga of Dharmapuri is one of the great works of modern Indian literature. ( ... ) Set against Vijayan's heroic and scatological Candide
originally written in Malayalam and finely translated into English by the author
the timidity of our own English talent for political satire is embarrassingly laid bare. For this is dangerous stuff, and cut close to the bone. ( ... ) Fiercest of all is Vijayan's Voltairean recoil from Indian cringing to power. — David Selbourne

An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

When I was growing up in the south Indian city of Madras, there were only two political parties that mattered; one was run by a former matinee idol, and the other was run by his former screenwriter. — Aravind Adiga

There is no man who is enterprising and keeps well up with the times but confesses that the women of to-day are in every respect, except political liberty, equal to the men. — S. Alice Callahan

We need to give out portrayal of ourselves. Every non-Indian writer writes about 1860 to 1890 pretty much, and there is no non-Indian writer that can write movies about contemporary Indians. Only Indians can. Indians are usually romanticized. Non-Indians are totally irrepsonsible with the appropriation of Indians, because any time tou have an Indian in a movie, it's political. They're not used as people, they're used as points. — Chris Eyre

I have to put down roots where I decide to stay. It wasn't enough for me to be an expatriate Indian in Canada. If I can't feel that I can make social, political and emotional commitments to a place, I have to find another place. — Bharati Mukherjee

I doubt very much if a man whose main literary interests were in works by Mr. Zane Grey, admirable as they may be, is particularly equipped to be the chief executive of this country, particularly where Indian Affairs are concerned. — Dean Acheson

While public school history courses in the United States stress the horrors of the German Nazi murder of 6 million Jews and Josef Stalin's pogroms against racial minorities and political dissidents in the Soviet Union, the facts that the U.S. Army's solution to the 'Indian Problem' was the prototype for the Nazi 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Problem' and that the North American Indian Reservation was the model for the twentieth century gulag and concentration camp, are conveniently overlooked. — Jonathan Ott

To be an Indian writer is to write, necessarily and inevitably, about politics, so it was a given that the story of the Ghoshes, the family at the centre of 'The Lives of Others,' should have a political soul. — Neel Mukherjee

The Greeks who rhapsodized about democracy in their rhetoric rarely created democratic institutions. A few cities such as Athens occasionally attempted a system vaguely akin to democracy for a few years. These cities functioned as slave societies and were certainly not egalitarian or democratic in the Indian sense. — Jack Weatherford

Too often, Indian tribes are at the mercy of the shifting political winds of State government. — Jim Costa

It is a pity that so many Americans today think of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without contemporary significance. In fact, the Indian plays much the same role in our society that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner's canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith. — Felix S. Cohen

In respect to Drower, and still more with Biruni and his medieval contemporaries, I am reminded of the praise given to Sir William Jones, the proponent of the idea that European and Indian languages had one common source. 'Blessed are the peacemakers,' commented political economist James Anderson, 'who by painful researches, tend to remove those destructive veils which have so long concealed mankind from each other. — Gerard Russell

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule. — Pankaj Mishra

If Independence is granted to India, power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters; all Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles. A day would come when even air and water would be taxed in India. — Winston S. Churchill

Dialogue is the basis of Indian culture, and we don't want to make any enemies. Political and ideological adversaries, perhaps, but not enemies. — Evo Morales

Stop talking about "rape" and start talking about "sex", and within a few decades India will attain the true mindset to prevent sexual assaults. — Abhijit Naskar

I think the best thing about my short-lived political career was that I saw the interiors of Bihar and UP. That is the real India, and, being an Indian, it was really sad to see our own people living in such dismal conditions. It was a real eye-opener. — Sanjay Dutt

I try not to put anything political on the forefront of what I'm trying to do creatively. At the same time, I do think it's wonderful when I hear people say that it's inspirational that I'm an Indian woman on camera. My life is very diverse, and my friends are a diverse group of people. — Mindy Kaling

My mission is to convert every Indian, every Englishman and finally the world to nonviolence for regulating mutual relations, whether political, economic, social or religious. — Mahatma Gandhi

The horror of Gandhi's murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence; the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger. — Mary McCarthy

It needs to be appreciated that despite political partition in 1947, the Indian Subcontinent continues to remain a single geographic entity, and as such dividing the natural resources equitably was and continues to remain a major challenge for the countries of the subcontinent. Water — A.K. Chaturvedi

We have reached a stage where governments and political processes have been hijacked by the corporate world. Corporations can within five hours influence the vote in the U.S. Congress. They can influence the entire voting patterns of the Indian Parliament. Ordinary people who put governments in power might want to go in a different direction. I call this the phenomenon of the inverted state, where the state is no longer accountable to the people. The state only serves the interests of corporations. — Vandana Shiva

Indian middle class is economic entity, not a political entity. — Vivek Kumar Singh