Quote collection
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"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."
"Sometimes we hurt one another without realizing it."
"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."
"My children needed me, and I like my job as a social worker."
"I had recently had the impression they were changing - not so much by becoming less pro-Pakistan as by becoming less anti-India. I was wrong. My visit to [Richard] Nixon did anything but avert the war."
"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!"
"I never believed in the danger of a third world war."
"I'm not ambitious. Not a bit."
"My father was a saint. He was the closest thing to a saint that you can find in a normal man."
"I don't see why we and the Chinese should have to be enemies."
"At a certain point the family moved to Jaipur, where no woman could avoid the doli or purdah. They kept her in the house from morning to night, either cooking or doing nothing. [My mother] hated doing nothing, she hated to cook. So she became pale and ill, and far from being concerned about her health, my grandfather said, 'Who's going to marry her now?' So my grandmother waited for my grandfather to go out, and then she dressed my mother as a man and let her go out riding with her brothers."
"If by happiness you mean instead an ordinary contentment, then yes - I'm fairly contented. Not satisfied - contented."
"I remember harrowing episodes. People who emigrated, people who didn't want to emigrate...Many Muslims didn't want to leave India to go to live in Pakistan, but the propaganda was that there they'd have greater opportunities and so they left. Many Hindus, on the other hand, didn't want to stay in Pakistan, but they had ties there or property and so they stayed."
"We were to equally strong types [with my husband], equally pigheaded - neither of us wanted to give in. And...I like to think those quarrels made us better, that they enlivened our life, because without them we would have had a normal life, yes, but banal and boring."
"I always defended my father, as a child, and I think I'm still defending him - his policies at least. Oh, he wasn't at all a politician, in no sense of the word. He was sustained in his work only by a blind faith in India - he was preoccupied in such an obsessive way by the future of India. We understood each other."
"I know I'll astonish everyone by talking like this, but it's God's truth. Honors have never tempted me and I've never sought them."
"It's a law of life - check it and you'll see it holds true in every situation of life."
"If by religion we mean a belief in humanity rather than the gods, an effort to make man better and a little happier, then yes, I'm very religious."
"I can't take it seriously when people get excited and scream that religion is in danger, and similar stupidities."
"With boys I climbed trees, ran races, and wrestled. I had no complexes of envy or inferiority toward boys. At the same time, however, I liked dolls."