Colonial India Quotes

Writing fiction is a respectable way of fibbing for a living - and enjoying it!
-Anne George ~ Anne George

Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; to the person fortunate enough to own a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension, and viable public transportation doesn't even compute. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare? ~ Mike Lofgren

The trust in Rome's coins was so strong that even outside the empire's borders, people were happy to receive payment in denarii. In the first century AD, Roman coins were an accepted medium of exchange in the markets of India, even though the closest Roman legion was thousands of miles away. The Indians had such a strong confidence in the denarius and the image of the emperor that when local rulers struck coins of their own they closely imitated the denarius, down to the portrait of the Roman emperor! ~ Yuval Noah Harari

That is the problem with comedy in India. Spoofing sells. Come up with original comedy about the hilarious nation we are, with funny accents and odd rituals, and we get into trouble. ~ Cyrus Broacha

Mother Teresa's numerical results were not her greatest contribution. Instead, she made the world-and especially India-conscious of compassion. ~ Peter Drucker

It is not that the people want a BJP government or Modi as PM. The Nation wants to teach a lesson to those who have ruined the nation. ~ Narendra Modi

I was working with Toby Gad, who spent a lot of time in India. There's a sitar [in "Body Shop"] and the song has a very Indian flavor to it. I liked the idea of the body of a car as a kind of sexual metaphor - What you do to a car, what you do in a car - drive. So, lots of innuendos, and lots of fun. ~ Madonna Ciccone

In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India to Spain. ~ Jim Al-Khalili

The songs that I've written about Africa, and AIDS and HIV and about the power of humanitarian love, those songs, I'm gonna sing them because I know that it's real. ~ India.Arie

I walked once behind a group of monks, in India. And they were very serious monks. The elderly monk, with his disciples around him, they were walking up a hill and I followed them. They never once looked at the beauty of the sky, the blue, the extraordinary blue of the sky and the mountains, and the blue light of the grass and the trees and the birds and the water - never once looked around. They were concerned and they had bent their head down and they were repeating something, which I happen to know in Sanskrit, and going along totally unaware of nature, totally unaware of the passers-by. Because their whole life has been spent in controlling desire and concentrating on what they thought is the way to reality. So desire there acted as a repressive limiting process. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

That is simple. In the Colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay. ~ Benjamin Franklin

p. 39 Rum, in fact, was the unspoken demon in most negotiations and failed treaties with the Delaware nation. That evil influence has been largely expunged from histories. Access to rum, or its prohibition, assured or canceled oaths and pacts no sooner than they were sworn. ~ Daniel Mark Epstein

I am thoroughly convinced that no individual or nation can live by holding itself apart from the community of others. Give and take is the law; and if India wants to raise herself once more, it is absolutely necessary that she brings out her treasures and throws them broadcast among the nations of the earth, and in return be ready to receive what others have to give her. Expansion is life, contraction is death. Love is life, and hatred is death. We commenced to die the day we began to hate other races; and nothing can prevent our death unless we come back to expansion, which is life. ~ Swami Vivekananda

There is an ancient tribal proverb I once heard in India. It says that before we can see properly we must first shed our tears to clear the way. ~ Libba Bray

In any case, he had long felt that Gandhi could provide some clues for him. Gandhi was not a Christian, but he lived in a community that endeavored to live by the teachings set forth in the Sermon on the Mount. Bonhoeffer wanted Christians to live that way. So he would travel to India to see it practiced by non-Christians. ~ Eric Metaxas

In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? ~ Salman Rushdie

Nobody in Colonial America, to be sure, believed that society owed every child the ultimate in education, but intelligence, industry, and thrift combined with ambition got many a poor man's son into the colonial colleges. ~ Louis B. Wright

Experience alone, that supreme educator of peoples, will be at pains to show us our mistake. It alone will be powerful enough to prove the necessity of replacing our odious text-books and our pitiable examinations by industrial instruction capable of inducing our young men to return to the fields, to the workshop, and to the colonial enterprise which they avoid to-day at all costs. ~ Gustave Le Bon

There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

If the Commander-in-Chief will look beyond the defence forces, he will discover that the real India is not military but peace-loving. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

My mother had been an English teacher in India before she came to the U.K., and she taught me to read early on - not only in English, but in Hindi, too. My teachers didn't like the fact that I was reading more quickly than they were teaching, and as a consequence, I would sometimes get bored in class. ~ Sanjeev Bhaskar

No form, no manifestation of knowledge, is senseless. ~ Narendra Modi

Proving one's innocence is as improbable as going to Pluto for
a honeymoon. It could take away everything you had in life, dear
ones, dreams, hopes and, most importantly, the right to have your
freedom. ~ Sheeja Jose

Let those men who still have these misguided ideas, let those men who still have these hallucinations, realize that by anarchism, by dastardly crimes, they cannot bring about good government; let them realize that these methods have not succeeded in any country of the world and are not likely to succeed in India. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Go on and love yourself, cause everything's gonna be alright. ~ India.Arie

I have a sewing machine that I adore, and I spend a lot of time sitting in front of it when I'm not working. And any excuse to paint or draw or do something artistic with my hands really gets me going. Definitely aspiring. ~ India De Beaufort

The brank, or scold's bridle, was unknown in America in its English shape: though from colonial records we learn that scolding women were far too plentiful, and were gagged for that annoying and irritating habit. ~ Alice Morse Earle

Why do we want to know history? Why does history form a recognized part of our liberal education? Simply because all of us, and every one of us, ought to know how we have come to be what we are, so that each generation need not start again from the same point, and toil over the same ground, but, profiting by the experience of those who came before, may advance towards higher points and nobler aims. ~ Friedrich Max Muller

The oldest among Kashmiris often claim that their is nothing new about their condition, that they they have been slaves of foreign rulers since the sixteenth century, when the Moghul emperor Akbar annexed Kashmir and appointed a local governer to rule the state. In the chaos of post-Moghul India, the old empire rapidly disintegrating, Afghani and Sikh invaders plundered Kashmir at will. The peasantry was taxed and taxed into utter wretchedness; the cultural and intellectual life, which under indigenous rulers had produced some of the greatest poetry, music, and philosophy in the subcontinent, dried up. Barbaric rules were imposed in the early nineteenth century, a Sikh who killed a native of Kashmir was fined nothing more than two rupees. Victor Jacquemont, a botanist and friend of Stendahl's who came to the valley in 1831, thought that nowhere else in India were the masses as poor and denuded as they were in Kashmir. ~ Pankaj Mishra

In contexts of colonial oppression, intellectuals, especially those who advocate and work for justice, cannot be just-or mere- intellectuals, in the abstract sense; they cannot but be immersed in some form or another of activism, to learn from fellow activists through real-life experiences, to widen the horizons of their sources of inspiration, and to organically engage in effective, collective emancipatory processes, without the self-indulgence, complacency, or ivory-towerness that might otherwise blur their moral vision. In short, to be just intellectuals, committed to justice as the most ethical and durable foundation of peace. ~ Omar Barghouti

That's how we keep this crazy place together - with the heart. Two hundred fuckin' languages, and a billion people. India is the heart. It's the heart that keeps us together. There's no place with people like my people, Lin. There's no heart like the Indian heart. ~ Gregory David Roberts

What I saw when I was a child was my father who was a pilot, and because of circumstances was thrown into the political system, and all I saw when was small after my grandmother died was my father in constant - constant combat with the system in India, and then I saw him die, actually. ~ Rahul Gandhi

Because of what I've chosen to do for my work in the world, almost every time that there's something that I'm afraid to do that I need to do, I have to do it in front of other people. It makes me feel exposed. ~ India.Arie

A poignant example of what it often takes to bring about an end to a superstitious barbaric act may be seen in the Indian practice of suttee, or the burning of widows. The British government abolished suttee by outlawing it, and followed up by severely punishing transgressors. As the nineteenth-century British commander in chief in India, General Charles Napier, told his charges who complained that suttee was their cultural custom that the British should respect: Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs. ~ Michael Shermer

India will not be a helpless partner in her own exploitation and foreign domination. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

My great-grandfather was in the army in India, and we have photographs of my family there in full Victorian dress. They're incredibly romantic. ~ Georgina Chapman

The law, right now, permits companies that close down American factories and offices and move those jobs overseas to take a tax deduction for the costs associated with moving the jobs to China or India or wherever. ~ Sheldon Whitehouse

Gandhi has more recently recognized the need for continuance of British, American and Chinese efforts in India and has suggested that these troops might remain by agreement with some new Indian Government. ~ Stafford Cripps

As far as the public is concerned, India is amazingly secular. ~ Shah Rukh Khan

Women see me as a figure they can respect. They know I've been through a lot. I'm not going to let no man put me under. ~ La India

In most states, it's more difficult to get a license for your dog than it is to buy a big cat. Right now, there are more tigers in the state of Texas than in all of India. ~ Tippi Hedren

Ethics based on this faultily quoted verse have changed nothing in post-Gandhi India, save the color of its administration. From a hungry man's point of view, though, it's all the same who makes him hungry. I submit that he may even prefer a white man to be responsible for his sorry state if only because this way social evil may appear to come from elsewhere and may perhaps be less efficient than the suffering at the hand of his own kind. With an alien in charge, there is still room for hope, for fantasy.
Similarly in post-Tolstoy Russia, ethics based on this misquoted verse undermined a great deal of the nation's resolve in confronting the police state. What has followed is known all too well: six decades of turning the other cheek transformed the face of the nation into one big bruise, so that the state today, weary of its violence, simply spits at that face. As well as at the face of the world. ~ Joseph Brodsky

For centuries, cultures throughout the world have used indigenous technologies to navigate life's complexities. From navigator-priests in Micronesia to mystics in India, vast sums of knowledge are available if we but recognize it. ~ Elizabeth Kapu'uwailani Lindsey

You are a girl, Shirin. Girls don't run around naked.'Why?'They just don't. ~ Renita D'Silva

Personally, I am far from convinced that the British system is suited to India. The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants but not necessarily which policies. It has spawned parties that are shifting alliances of individual interests rather than the vehicles of coherent sets of ideas. It has forced governments to concentrate less on governing than on staying in office, and obliged them to cater to the lowest common denominator of their coalitions. It is time for a change. Pluralist ~ Shashi Tharoor

In our times, significantly, the three outstanding voices against violence have been silenced by murder - Mahatma Gandhi in India, Archbishop Romero in El Salvador, and Dr. Martin Luther King, here at home. ~ Millicent Fenwick

Not very long after this a very exciting thing happened. Not only Sara, but the entire school, found it exciting, and made it the chief subject of conversation for weeks after it occurred. In one of his letters Captain Crewe told a most interesting story. A friend who had been at school with him when he was a boy had unexpectedly come to see him in India. He was the owner of a large tract of land upon which diamonds had been found, and he was engaged in developing the mines. If all went as was confidently expected, he would become possessed of such wealth as it made one dizzy to think of; and because he was fond of the friend of his school days, he had given him an opportunity to share in this enormous fortune by becoming a partner in his scheme. This, at least, was what Sara gathered from his letters. It is true that any other business scheme, however magnificent, would have had but small attraction for her or for the schoolroom; but "diamond mines" sounded so like the Arabian Nights that no one could be indifferent. Sara thought them enchanting, and painted pictures, for Ermengarde and Lottie, of labyrinthine passages in the bowels of the earth, where sparkling stones studded the walls and roofs and ceilings, and strange, dark men dug them out with heavy picks. Ermengarde delighted in the story, and Lottie insisted on its being retold to her every evening. Lavinia was very spiteful about it, and told Jessie that she didn't believe such things as diamond mines existed. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

Real time functioning should have the PM and the CMs of the states working in tandem. The Federal structure is important in letter and spirit, it is our strength ~ Narendra Modi

There are many singers who have got an exceptional talent, but spend their lives singing in local trains or hotels. Does the country even know who they are? Music in India is restricted only to Bollywood. Whoever manages to make a mark there is remembered. The ones who fail to reach and make it big there are forgotten. ~ Sonu Nigam

I think taking the biggest star in India and the biggest star in America, and putting them together in a movie that starts in America and ends up in India, or starts in India and goes to America. I think it would be a buddy cop formula. ~ Brett Ratner