Castes Quotes

Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy; blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another. ~ Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Harijan service is a duty the caste Hindus owe to themselves. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I too belong to an OBC caste but I have never used my community to get power ~ Narendra Modi

Every strategy for real social change - land reform, education, public health, the equitable distribution of natural resources ... - has been cleverly, cunningly, and consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes and that class of people which has a stranglehold on the political process. ~ Arundhati Roy

Man treats woman as his own property and not as being capable of feelings, like himself. The way man treats women is much worse than the way landlords treat servants and the high-caste treat the low-caste. These treat them so demeaningly only in situations mutually affecting them; but men treat cruelly and as slaves, from their birth till death. ~ Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

It is, of course, its essentially schizophrenic outlook on society that makes the middle classes such a peculiar mixture of yeast and dough. We tend nowadays to forget that it has always been the great revolutionary class; we see much more the doughy aspect, the bourgeoisie as the heartland of reaction, the universal insult, forever selfish and conforming. Now this Janus-like quality derives from the class's one saving virtue, which is this: that alone of the three great castes of society it sincerely and habitually despises itself. ~ John Fowles

Whyle I was abowte to chaunge myn olde lyff
What sorowe I suffred, dyseese, angre and stryff,
Cracchynge myn here, my chekys all totare,
Wrythynge my fyngres for angwysshe and care,
Watrynge the erthe with my byttre salte teres
That the crye of my syghes ascended to Goddys eres,
My knees with myn handys grasped togedyre soore,
And yitt I stode the same man I was afore
Tyl a depe profounde remembraunce att the laste
Hadd all my wrecchednesse afore myn eyn caste ~ Petrarch

Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

She was everywhere. She was screaming in her tortured body. She was watching from cameras in every room. She was the false weather system and the storage devices. She was the gate keeper, throwing six shirts over her swan-brothers necks...opening six doors for her brothers to step through as young men, though their bodies were long gone, used up by the organ banks of the upper castes.

A Lamentation of Swans ~ J.A. Ironside

Cultivation of mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence. ~ B.R. Ambedkar

Develop a sense of the brotherhood of man. Look upon each person as your own brother. There is only one caste, the caste of humanity. All of us belong to the human race, so everyone is equal. Therefore, love each one equally. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

Ideas are fatal to caste. ~ E. M. Forster

Holi, the spring carnival, when members of all castes mingle and let down their hair, sprinkling one another with cascades of red powder and liquid, symbolic of the blood that was probably used in past centuries. ~ Wendy Doniger

One of the half-caste's few vices was a prodigious vanity. Yet this vanity was based on concrete results. ~ Arthur W. Upfield

That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. They didn't look back, and they often didn't tell their children about it. They didn't want to talk about it. It was too painful, what they'd gone through and the caste system of the South, which was Jim Crow. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:
touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too. ~ William Faulkner

Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measuresby results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations. ~ Noam Chomsky

Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold the most important positions. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Pity and need Make all flesh kin. There in no caste in blood. ~ Edwin Arnold

The lower caste people were killed as part of a conspiracy to dismiss my party's government. ~ Lalu Prasad Yadav

No religion is absolutely perfect. Yet not only do we fight for religion, but also are we often willing to sacrifice our lives for it. And what we hopelessly fail to do is to live it. A true religion is that which has no caste, no creed, no colour. It is but an all-uniting and all-pervading embrace. ~ Sri Chinmoy

As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for - and it must be said again - the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo

The soul has neither sex, nor caste nor imperfection. ~ Swami Vivekananda

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. ~ John Dewey

I like the religion that teaches liberty, equality and fraternity. ~ B.R. Ambedkar

We want a good government that works. Let us rise above caste divisions and nepotism and pledge to elect a government that is development oriented. Delhi needs a stable government and a strong government ~ Narendra Modi

Like most young Annawadians, the girls considered the caste obsession of their elders to be an irrelevant artifact. Manju and Meena had become friends because they both loved to dance, and stayed friends because they could keep each other's secrets. ~ Katherine Boo

Every sacred book, successively, has been accepted in the faith that it was to be the final resting-place of the sojourning soul;but after all, it was but a caravansary which supplied refreshment to the traveler, and directed him farther on his way to Isphahan or Bagdat. Thank God, no Hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste. ~ Henry David Thoreau

A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose-well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes-make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words "Not to be published" drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed, "What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness! ~ Aldous Huxley

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system. ~ Seamus Heaney

Though we are all human beings, we have built walls between ourselves and our neighbors through nationalism, through race, caste, and class - which again breeds isolation, loneliness. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

It is absurd to quote religion or God or religious doctrines to render the people as lowest castes. ~ Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

Controlling women as the means of reproduction is made even more necessary by any race or caste or class system. It just comes together, it's just like life. And therefore it's not even practical to be a feminist without being anti-racist or against classism. It just doesn't work. ~ Gloria Steinem

But if the ants are not despondent because they have failed to produce a new social invention or convention in 65 million years, why should we be discouraged because some of our institutions and castes have not been able to evolve a new idea in the past fifty centuries? ~ William Morton Wheeler

You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the state. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes - make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. ~ Aldous Huxley

Justice has always evoked ideas of equality, of proportion of compensation.
Equity signifies equality. Rules and regulations, right and righteousness are concerned with equality in value.
If all men are equal, then all men are of the same essence, and the common essence entitles them of the same fundamental rights and equal liberty ...
In short justice is another name of liberty, equality and fraternity. ~ B.R. Ambedkar

Music is language itself. It should not have any barriers of caste, creed, language or anything. Music is one, only cultures are different. Music is the language of languages. It is the ultimate mother of languages. ~ A.R. Rahman

But a people, having taken its rise in civilization and democracy, which should gradually establish an inequality of conditions, until it arrived at inviolable privileges and exclusive castes, would be a novelty in the world; and nothing intimates that America is likely to furnish so singular an example. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

I had grown up in a privileged, upper-caste Hindu community; and because my father worked for a Catholic hospital, we lived in a prosperous Christian neighborhood. ~ Aravind Adiga

Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him. Even if I did not, I should pretend to; for a taste in his music is a mark of caste among musicians, and should be worn, like a tall hat, by the amateur who wishes to pass for a true Brahmin. ~ George Bernard Shaw

When the family is destroyed, the ancient laws of family duty cease; when law ceases, lawlessness overwhelms the family; when lawlessness overwhelms the women of the family, they become corrupted; when women are corrupted, the intermixture of castes is the inevitable result. Intermixture of castes drags down to hell both those who destroy the family and the family itself; the spirits of the ancestors fall, deprived of their offerings of rice and water. Such are the evils caused by those who destroy the family: because of the intermixture of castes, caste duties are obliterated and the permanent duties of the family as well. ~ Anonymous Bhagavad Gita

It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose - well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes - make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. ~ Aldous Huxley

The Olympic Movement is a 20th century religion. Where there is no injustice of caste, of race, of family, of wealth. ~ Avery Brundage

Caste is important for selection of home minister. ~ Sushilkumar Shinde

I regret that I must so continually use the word genius, as if that should apply only to a caste as well defined from those below as income-tax payers are from the untaxed. The word genius was very probably invented by a man who had small claims on it himself; greater men would have understood better what to be a genius really was, and probably they would have come to see that the word could be applied to most people. Goethe said that perhaps only a genius is able to understand a genius. ~ Otto Weininger

Now I have no caste, no creed,
I am no more what I am! ~ Kabir

The tension between autonomy and expertise had been, at a basic level, fundamental to the Protestant experience itself from the Reformation forward, as the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, increasing literacy, and vernacular translations of the Bible undermined the clerical caste's monopoly on spiritual authority. In the twentieth-century United States, professional specialization, the Progressive emphasis on technical expertise, and simply the ever more complex nature of modern urban life pulled readers toward greater reliance on literary guidance, while the logic of consumerism, rooted in the all-powerful choice to buy or not to buy, further reinforced the notion of reader autonomy. ~ Matthew Hedstrom

Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Intercourse is an assertion of mastery, one that announces his own higher caste and proves it upon a victim who is expected to surrender, serve, and be satisfied. ~ Kate Millett

There is such a thing as caste, even in the West; but it is comparatively faint; it is conservatism here. It says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds; the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood is wholly filial. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The purification required is not of untouchables but of the so-called superior castes. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

This poem is a witness to the rape of Shurpanaka.
This poem smears Rama for his suspicious mind.
This poem was once forced into suttee.
This poem is now taking her revenge.
This poem is addicted to eating beef.
This poem knows the castes of all the thirty-three million Hindu Gods.
This poem got court summons for switching the castes of Gods.
This poem once dated Karna who was sure he was no test-tube baby.
This poem is not curious about who-was-the-father.
This poem is horizontally flipped.
This poem is a plagiarised version.
This poem is selectively chosen.
This poem is running paternity tests on Hindutva. ~ Meena Kandasamy

Especially in urban areas, nobody cares so much [about castes], because you are forced to live in the same buildings. There is so, so little space. You can't be thinking about whether you are living in a street that has only Brahmins, or in a building that has been touched only by Muslims or Christians. You just live there, because that's the only place that you can find. So such distinctions just crumble away. There are people who maintain them, at all costs. But for the most part, it doesn't matter. ~ Anita Rau Badami

Women were relegated to an inferior caste ... most dramatically with the coming of industrialization. 'Women's work' was segregated from significant human activity. ~ Madonna Kolbenschlag

Though our castes and institutions are apparently linked with our religion, they are not so. These institutions have been necessary to protect us as a nation, and when this necessity for self-preservation will no more exist, they will die a natural death. But the older I grow, the better I seem to think of these time-honored institutions of India. There was a time when I used to think that many of them were useless and worthless; but the older I grew, the more I seem to feel a diffidence in cursing any one of them, for each one of them is the embodiment of the experience of centuries. A child of but yesterday, destined to die the day after tomorrow, comes to me and asks me to change all my plans; and if I hear the advice of that baby and change all my surroundings according to his ideas, I myself should be a fool, and no one else. Much of the advice that is coming to us from different countries is similar to this. Tell these wiseacres: "I will hear you when you have made a society yourselves. You cannot hold on to one idea for two days, you quarrel and fail; you are born like moths in the spring and die like them in five minutes. You come up like bubbles and burst like bubbles too. First form a stable society like ours. First make laws and institutions that remain undiminished in their power through scores of centuries. Then will be the time to talk on the subject with you, but till then, my friend, you are only a giddy child. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past. ~ Herbert Read

There are three kinds of Peers; the one who did the shitty job for upper-castes, the one who sold their rights for upper-castes's entertaintment, and the one who is going to bring the upper-castes down."
"Which one is you?"
"Apparently, all three of them. ~ Rea Lidde

To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

The institution known as "school" isn't just a facility for doing classwork. It's essentially a microcosm of society, all of humanity put together in a little diorama. Bully exists in schools because war and conflict exist in the world, and school castes reflect our stratified, hierarchical society. Living in a democracy, the tyranny of the majority naturally applies at school, too. The majority -- that is to say, the people with the most friends -- are superior. ~ Wataru Watari

New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

I am neither a child, a young man, nor an ancient; nor am I of any caste. ~ Guru Nanak