Shashi Tharoor Quotes

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.

By the time Gandhi met Muhammad Ali in Delhi in April 1915it was, Gandhi said, 'love at first sight.'

If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable.

Gandhi: Ninny of the 20th Century.

Gandhi, who went to Wendy's and asked, "Where's the belief?" Never got a dinner!

Civil disobedience is a preparation for mute suffering.

Gandhi was inevitable. If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore Gandhi at our own risk.

But nonviolence was never for the oppressor; it was for the oppressed.

Satyagraha as conceived by me is a science in the making.

If they are truly nonviolent, they must also realize that civil disobedience is an impossibility till the preliminary work of construction is done.

Gandhi was important for another reason as well: his country was suffering under the British Empire, and yet he was leading a very singular kind of resistance to it. At the time he was speaking about the violence in Europe, his followers were in jail as prisoners of the British government.

In satyagraha, a courted imprisonment carries its own praise.

Satyagraha is a law for universal application. Beginning with the family, its use can be extended to every other circle.

Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.

The primary object of non-co-operation is nowhere stated to be paralysis of the Government. The primary object is self-purification.

It is claimed for satyagraha that it is a complete substitute for violence or war.

I and others may be revolutionaries but we are disciples of Mahatma Gandhi, directly or indirectly, nothing more nothing less.

About Mahatma Gandhi: Great in taking decisions, great in executing them, Mahatma Gandhi was incomparably great in the last stand which he made on behalf of his country. He is undoubtedly one of the greatest men the world has ever seen. The world hath need of him, and if he is mocked and jeered at by "the people of importance," "the people with a stake in this country," - the Scribes and Pharisees of the days of Christ - he will be gratefully remembered, now and always, by a nation which he led from victory to victory.

Non-violent resistance implies the very opposite of weakness. Defiance combined with non-retaliatory acceptance of repression from one's opponents is active, not passive. It requires strength, and there is nothing automatic or intuitive about the resoluteness required for using non-violent methods in political struggle and the quest for Truth.

Satyagraha and civil disobedience and fasts have nothing in common with the use of force, veiled or open.

Non-co-operation is a movement intended to invite Englishmen to co-operate with us on honourable terms or retire from our land.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

It will be hard to find a parallel in history in which unarmed people have represented the urge for freedom, turning their armlessness into the central means for deliverance.

My interest in India's freedom will cease if she adopts violent means, for their fruit will not be freedom but slavery in disguise.

Satyagraha thrives on repression till at last the repressor is tired of it and the object of satyagraha is gained.