Jawaharlal Nehru Quotes

That king who through folly rashly oppresses his kingdom, (will), together with his relatives, ere long be deprived of his life and of his kingdom. As the lives of living creatures are destroyed by tormenting their bodies, even so the lives of kings are destroyed by their oppressing their kingdoms

What I don't understand about you chaps is that you are always objecting to things that are not being done in accordance with British justice, and at the same time you keep attacking us British.

Whatever is good for the People is bad for their Governors; and what is good for the Governors is pernicious for the People.

The English have come…. They have built a fort. They eat my land, and yet they have given me nothing at all. They have made me sign a treaty. They curtail my power and I get nothing at all from them in return.

Existing colonial empires rest upon insecure foundations. There seems, indeed, something unnatural in the spectacle of seven million Dutch ruling over fifty million Malays.

Resentment — that feeling when the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership.

There is an attitude that Okinawans have about Japan itself. There is a resentment.

… neither the sanctions of international law nor the justice of a cause can be depended upon for a fair settlement of differences, when they come into conflict with a strong political necessity on the one side opposed to comparative weakness on the other.

… a hydra-headed monster eating the flesh of the common man.

Sometimes great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

That dense population in extreme distress inhabited an island where there was an established church which was not their church; and a territorial aristocracy, the richest of whom lived in distant capitals. Thus they had a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and, in addition, the weakest executive in the world. That was the Irish question.

Ask of politicians the end for which laws were originally designed, and they will answer that the laws were designed as a protection for the poor and weak against the oppression of the rich and powerful. But surely no pretense can be so ridiculous

Women to govern men, slaves freemen, are much in the same degree; all being total violations and perversions of the laws of nature and nations.

We question why liberty should be sent from France which has too little to America which has too much.

If we had but one square mile left, they [the whites of Georgia] would not be satisfied unless they could get it.

The writers of the Declaration of Independence were mistaken when they affirmed that all men are created equal. My slaves did not choose their lot in life, neither did we ask for ours; we are created for these places.

… the unhappy Peasant cannot survive in his humble shelter; today pigswill is his only nourishment; what was once lavished on swine is now shared between man and beast. The People ask only for bread; they are even willing to pay for it with the sweat of their brows: at least let them eat it without watering it with tears.

Woman was the first human being that tasted bondage. Woman was a slave before the slave existed.

Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one

Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority.

Patriarchy is a political system just like colonialism was a political system.

He [Andrew Jackson] looked after the little fellow who had no pull.

It has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm . . . between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.

It's not only inhumane to treat Puerto Ricans as second-class citizens. It's deeply un-American.