Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
Indira Gandhi
-
“How can anybody who is the head of a nation afford not to be a pragmatist?”
-
“You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.”
-
“... I would like to ask a question. Would this sort of war or savage bombing which has taken place in Vietnam have been tolerated for so long, had the people been European?”
-
“It has been my experience that people who are at cross purposes with nature are cynical about mankind and ill at ease with themselves.”
-
“Every democratic system evolves its own conventions. It is not only the water but the banks which make the river.”
-
“Without peace there can be no prosperity for any people, rich or poor. And yet, there can be no peace without erasing the harshness of the growing contrast between the rich and the poor.”
-
“The question before the advanced nations is not whether they can afford to help the developing nations, but whether they can afford not to do so.”
-
“Even today to be civilised is held to be synonymous with being westernised. Advanced countries devote large resources to formulating and spreading ideas and doctrines and they tend to impose on the developing nations their own norms and methods. The pattern of the classical acquisitive society with its deliberate multiplication of wants not only is unsuited to conditions in our countries but is positively harmful.”
-
“We have believed — and we do believe now — that freedom is indivisible, that peace is indivisible, that economic prosperity is indivisible.”
-
“... in today's world no country can be absolutely independent of another. It is a world of interdependence.”
-
“The power to question is the basis of all human progress.”
-
“Rebels and non-conformists are often the pioneers and designers of change.”
-
“Whenever you take a step forward you are bound to disturb something. You disturb the air as you go forward, you disturb the dust, the ground. You trample upon things. When a whole society moves forward this tramping is on a much bigger scale and each thing that you disturb, each vested interest which you want to remove, stands as an obstacle.”
-
“The greatest of all contraceptives is affluence.”
-
“The immediate is often the enemy of the ultimate.”
-
“... what is popular need not necessarily be right or wise.”
-
“The civil servant is primarily the master of the short-term solution.”
-
“You must learn to be still in the midst of activity, and to be vibrantly alive in moments of calm.”
-
“It is our duty to create a social milieu in which the young and the socially weak feel that the present and future belong to them.”
-
“To me the function of politics is to make possible the desirable.”
-
“In an underdeveloped society, the first anxiety is of infant mortality. In an advanced one it is to keep alive the aged.”
-
“Mankind will endure when the world appreciates the logic of diversity.”
-
“It is legitimate to have one's own point of view and political philosophy. But there are people who make anger, rather than a deeply held belief, the basis of their actions. They do not seem to mind harming society as a whole in the pursuit of their immediate objective. No society can survive if it yields to the demands of frenzy, whether of the few or the many.”
-
“Unfortunately, people tend to forget their duties but remember their rights.”
-
“I am proud that I spent the whole of my life in the service of my people ... I shall continue to serve until my last breath and when I die, I can say, that every drop of my blood will invigorate India and strengthen it.”
-
“... where does strength come from? It is not muscle strength any more. It is not also mere intellectual strength. What is strength? Strength is the support of the people.”
-
“Nothing can convince me that people are at one with their work unless they're joyous about it.”
-
“Home is wherever I go.”
-
“Every new experience brings its own maturity and a greater clarity of vision.”
-
“The longer one doesn't write, the more difficult it is to communicate.”
-
“Politics is the art of acquiring, holding and wielding power.”
-
“A nation's strength ultimately consists in what it can do on its own, and not in what it can borrow from others.”
-
“My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group: there was much less competition.”
-
“My theory is that men are no more liberated than women.”
-
“Martyrdom does not end something; it is only the beginning. ”
-
“If I die a violent death, as some fear and a few are plotting, I know that the violence will be in the thought and the action of the assassins, not in my dying.”
Indira Gandhi, Indian prime minister
(1917 - 1984)
Full name: Indira Privadarshini Nehru Gandhi, India’s first female prime minister, second female head of state in the world.