"People who say it was her father who prepared her for the post of prime minister, it was her father who launched her, are wrong."
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Indira Gandhi quotes (page 8 of 13)
260 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Yes, he [Mahatma Gandhi] was a great man. However...between me and Gandhi there was never the understanding there was between me and my father."
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"When [my father] asked me to help him, I really didn't suspect the consequences."
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"Not only my parents but the whole family was involved in the resistance - my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts, my cousings of both sexes. So ever so often the police came and took them away, indiscriminately. Well, the fact that they arrested both my father and mother, both my grandfather and grandmother, both an uncle and an aunt, made me accustomed to looking on men and women with the same eyes, on an absolute plane of equality."
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"I began to associate with Mahatma Gandhi when he came and went in our house - together with my father and mother he was on the executive committee. After independence I worked with him a lot - in the period when there were the troubles between Hindus and Muslims, he assigned me to take care of the Muslims. To protect them."
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"I suspected [Richard Nixon] was very pro-Pakistan. Or rather I knew that the Americans had always been in favor of Pakistan - not so much because they were in favor of Pakistan, but because they were against India."
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"In fact the communists gained strength in India when the people thought my party was moving to the right. And they were correct."
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"... where does strength come from? It is not muscle strength any more. It is not also mere intellectual strength. What is strength? Strength is the support of the people."
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"Until I was about eighteen, yes [I didn't want to get married]. But not because I felt like a suffragette, but because I wanted to devote all my energies to the struggle to free India. Marriage, I thought, would have distracted me from the duties I'd imposed on myself."
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"My father was prime minister, and to take care of his home, to be his hostess, automatically meant to have my hands in politics - to meet people, to know their games, their secrets."
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"The doctors advised me not to have even one. My health was still not good, and they said that pregnancy might be fatal. If they hadn't said that to me, maybe I wouldn't have got married. But that diagnosis provoked me, it infuriated me. I answered, 'Why do you think I'm getting married if not to have children? I don't want to hear that I can't have children; I want you to tell me what I have to do in order to have children!'"
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"That's always been my philosophy. - I've never thought of the consequences of a necessary action."
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"I have certain objectives. They're the same objectives my father had to give people a higher standard of living, to do away with the cancer of poverty, to eliminate the consequences of economic backwardness."
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"I fall in love with anything I do and I always try to do it well."
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"The meek may one day inherit the earth, but not the headlines."
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"I refuse to indulge in small talk. And compliments, if at all, I save for after the job is done."
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"I don't see the world as something divided between right and left."
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"I had many dolls. And you know how I played with them? By performing insurrections, assemblies, scenes of arrest. My dolls were almost never babies to be nursed but men and women who attacked barracks and ended up in prison."
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"The struggle for independence here has been conducted in equal measure by men and by women. And when we got our independence, no one forgot that. In the Western world, on the other hand, nothing of the kind has ever happened - women have participated, yes, but revolutions have always been made by men alone."
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"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."
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