Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.

No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings and consequently, some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves.

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

India lives in her villages, we are told in every other sanctimonious public speech, That's bullshit. India doesn't live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India's villages just live only to serve her cities. Her villages are her citizen's vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just.

This is true across every single society; we project grossness onto a racial or gender subgroup or caste. A big part of social subordination and discrimination is to ascribe hyper-animality to other groups and use that as an excuse for subordinating them further.

Untouchability is a hydra-headed monster.

Untouchability is an error of long standing.

Whether our feet are compressed in iron shoes, our faces hidden with veils and masks; whether yoked with cows to draw the plow through its furrows, or classed with idiots, lunatics and criminals in the laws and constitutions of the State, the principle is the same; for the humiliations of the spirit are as real as the visible badges of servitude.

If you have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is to convince yourself that the person is subhuman. And won't mind the enslavement. The second thing you must do is convince your allies that the person is subhuman so that you have some support. But the third and the unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he, she, is not quite a first class citizen.

Untouchability is a many-headed monster and forms, some of them so subtle as not to be easily detected.

It is a crime and a sin to regard a person as untouchable because he is born in a particular community.

It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

Face it, the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us.

I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people.

Discrimination is alive and soaring.

Modern life is organised so that you benefit at the expense of the other, and the most extreme example of that is a camp.