Sanjay Gandhi Quotes

Brahmins do not have the right to call themselves Indians … If India has to become a modern nation, … It has to establish an egalitarian relationship between Brahmins and the lower castes.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

We cannot put into the Constitution, owing to existing prejudices and existing institutions, an entire exclusion of all class distinctions.

You have countries like India that have tried to help untouchables, with essentially affirmative-action programs, but it hasn't fundamentally changed the structure of their societies.

I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.

I cannot believe there is caste system in society; I cannot believe people are judged on the basis of their prosperity.

There is no caste in blood.

On the battlefield, there is no distinction between upper and lower class.

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste... would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over all the world.

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

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.

When one English person speaks, another one immediately classifies him. No class system in the world is so audible, which is also why it is so pernicious and enduring.

Caste has divided us. I wish it should be completely abolished from our society.

The Pariahs, our fellow beings, ought to be educated by the higher castes.

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.

Sexism, like racism, goes with us into the next century. I see class warfare as overshadowing both.

I reject absolutely the idea that people should know their place, and know their class.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

I think the presence of caste in India, how the villages are geographically structured on caste lines, is very different from China. The presence of an egalitarian culture is striking in a Chinese village.

Our aristocracy, unlike that of Europe, is open to all comers.

I don't like a class system. I don't like the idea of being in a different class than other people.

India’s great curse is caste; but English education has already proved a tremendous power in leveled the injurious distinctions of caste

To abolish class distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself.

Brahmins cannot hope to claim a high and superior status forever. Times are changing. They have to come down.

Nothing can be more repugnant to the individualism and love of freedom of the British race than the Hindu caste system, under which every man is born into a particular water-tight compartment from which he cannot emerge except through death and rebirth …