Atishi Quotes

I cannot become a Chowkidar because I am Brahmin. Brahmins can't be Chowkidars. It's a fact.

A kshatriya woman's highest purpose in life is to support the warriors in her life: her father, brother, husband and sons.

Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride; and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.

Caste in India is the first and last reality.

Being born a girl in India, it matters a lot what family you are born into.

I am from a very vague caste. I don't belong to any of the four. I am kayastha. They are well read, largely clerks so they get treated respectfully.

I think the Indian media suffers from a feudal mindset.

The more I study Hindu scriptures, and the more I discuss them with Brahmins, the more I feel convinced that untouchability is the greatest blot upon Hinduism.

The Inca honored the men of the blood royal by permitting them to bore their ears where women do today, but with larger holes … and this was the sign of nobility and royal caste ...

The idea of the nation [India] itself is incompatible with the institution of caste.

No Hindu community, however low, will touch cow's flesh. On the other hand, there is no community which is really an Untouchable community which has not something to do with the dead cow. Some eat her flesh, some remove the skin, some manufacture articles out of her skin and bones.

The Touchables, whether they are vegetarians or flesh-eaters, are united in their objection to eat cow's flesh. As against them stand the Untouchables, who eat cow's flesh without compunction and as a matter of course and habit.

One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.

We can't deny the existence of caste in India. We have to live with it.

I describe the relationship between man and woman as a Hegelian relationship between master and slave. As long as men are able to increase their sexual value through work, fame or wealth, while women are only powerful through their body, beauty and youth, nothing will change.

In the local state school I attended in England, I saw and heard far more awareness of where a person stood in the social hierarchy than I had ever heard stateside.

I certainly don't think that the heirs of the American Revolution were a particularly noble class.

Caste may be bad. Caste may lead to conduct so gross as to be called man's inhumanity to man. All the same, it must be recognized that the Hindus observe Caste not because they are inhuman or wrong-headed. They observe Caste because they are deeply religious.

I don't even know whether I am a savarna or not, I am a Kayasth, so I am not Brahmin or Kshatriya or Vaishya or Shudra.

The nomads' egalitarian lifestyle astonished the Greeks, who kept their own women indoors weaving and minding children. The exotic Scythian lifestyle fueled the Greek imagination and led to an outpouring of myths about fierce Amazons, 'the equals of men.'

In the late 1950s, the woman's place in society was second-class.

Character and class are character and class. Either you have it or you don't.

I was an Indian with zero sense of caste till I was 20. That's an unusual privilege but it came out of the fact that I was a middle-class Bengali.

People often think of America as a classless society, but, of course, that isn't true. Within immigrant communities, there's an enormous distinction of class, depending on who your parents are, and that kind of thing comes out really quick in things like marriage and interpersonal relationships.