Indira Gandhi Quotes - Page 6

I can't take it seriously when people get excited and scream that religion is in danger, and similar stupidities.

It's a law of life - check it and you'll see it holds true in every situation of life.

My children needed me, and I like my job as a social worker.

I don't waste time in flowery small talk, as people do in India.

I've always discovered things for myself, in marvelous freedom.

They're the problems of poverty, of the rights of the individual, of the changes brought about by technology. They're the ones that count, more than religion!

The Western press has always insisted that India was Pakistan's enemy and vice versa, that the Hindus were against the Muslims and vice versa. They've never said, for instance, that my party has been fighting this attitude ever since we have maintained that religious hostilities are wrong and absurd, that minorities cannot be eliminated from a country, that people of different religions must live together.

What good does it do to remain tied to an ideology if you don't achieve anything by it? I have an ideology myself - you can't work in a vacuum; you have to have faith in something.

How is it possible for people in the modern world to go on killing each other for religion? The problems we should be concerned with nowadays are quite different!

I don't care if I remain prime minister. I'm only interested in doing a good job as long as I'm capable and for as long as I don't get tired.

Home is wherever I go.

My father was a statesman, I'm a political woman. My father was a saint. I'm not.

Naturally, if the Americans had fired a shot, if the Seventh Fleet had done something more than sit there in the Bay of Bengal...yes, the Third World War would have exploded. But, in all honesty, not even that fear occurred to me.

To become our enemies - what an absurdity. A crazy absurdity when you stop to think that we, Muslims and Hindus, had conducted the struggle for independence together.

By now even the word socialism has so many meanings and interpretations. The Russians call themselves socialists, the Swedes call themselves. And let's not forget that in Germany there was also a national socialism.

I certainly won't have an empty life!

I suggested a compromise to give the banks a year's time and see if they succeed in showing us that nationalization wasn't necessary. The year went by and we realized it hadn't done any good, that the money still ended up in the hands of the rich industrialists or friends of the bankers. So I concluded that it was necessary to nationalize the banks. And we did. Without considering it a socialist gesture or an antisocialist gesture, just a necessary one. Anyone who nationalizes only so as to be considered on the left to me is a fool.

Even I, when I was a student in London, often wore Western clothes, and yet I'm the most Indian Indian I know.

America always thought it was helping Pakistan. But if it hadn't helped Pakistan, Pakistan would have been a stronger country.

[Visiting Richard Nixon] useful only to me. The experience taught me that when people do something against you, that something always turns out in your favor.

I'm certainly not tired - work doesn't tire people, it's getting bored that's tiring.

My fiancé, you see, belonged to another religion. He was a Parsi. And this was something nobody could stand - all of India was against us. They wrote to Gandhi, to my fther, to me. Insults, death threats. Every day the postman arrived with an enormous sack and dumped the letters on the floor. We even stopped reading them; we let a couple of friends read them and tell us what was in them.

At first people asked us, 'Can you do it?' And we kept silent because we didn't believe in ourselves, we didn't believe that we could do things. Today people no longer say to us, 'Can you?' They say, 'When can you?' Because the Indians finally believe in themselves, they believe they can do things.

Everything I've done, I've done because I wanted to do it. In doing it, I've plunged in headlong, always believing in it.

When you govern a country, and especially a country so vast and complex as India, you never arrive at anything.