Barack Obama 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.

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.

In India, cast not class … is what counts most in popular life.

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

India will have to hang down her head in shame if even one person is left who is said in any way to be untouchable.

If everyone simply ignores the caste system, it will go away overnight.

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

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

There is no caste in blood.

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

Untouchables are treated as if less than beasts …. Untouchability for me is more insufferable than British rule. If Hinduism hugs Untouchability, then Hinduism is dead and gone.

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 …

Caste in India is the first and last reality.

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

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

Indian leaders are saying, "You don't understand our caste system. It's really a lovely thing. People are very happy about it and so on." I don't think that's quite fair.

I would not sell the vital interests of the untouchables for the sake of winning the freedom of India.

For many centuries Chinese society has been free of class distinctions such as are found even in advanced democracies.

The closest Indian analogy to the position of black Americans is that of the Dalits - formerly called 'Untouchables,' the outcastes who for millennia suffered humiliating discrimination and oppression.

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.