Mahatma Gandhi La Quotations

I do not believe that the spiritual law works on a field of its own. On the contrary, it expresses itself only through the ordinary activities of life. It thus affects the economic, the social and the political fields.

Is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater courage? Without her, man would not be. If nonviolence is to be the law of our being, the future is with women.

Of all the black crimes that humanity is committing against the great Creation, vivisection is the blackest.

The taking of vows that are not feasible or that are beyond one's capacity would betray thoughtlessness and want of balance.

Swadeshi is the only doctrine consistent with the law of humanity and love.

True swadeshi is that alone in which all the processes through which cotton has to pass are carried out in the same village or town.

The use of soul-force for turning stones into bread would have been considered, as it is still considered, as black magic.

When a slave begins to take pride in his fetters and hugs them like precious ornaments, the triumph of the slave-owner is complete.

A slave-holder cannot hold a slave without putting himself or his deputy in the cage for holding the slave.

No one chains a slave without chaining himself.

The way of mutual strife and exclusiveness is the only way to perdition and slavery.

To end slavery, you must overcome the mental and physical inertia of the masses and quicken their intelligence and creative faculty.

The platform of services is as big as the world. It is never overcrowded.

The safest rule of conduct is to claim kinship when we want to do service and not to insist on kinship when we want to assert a right.

Islam appeals to people because it appeals also to reason.

There is no doubt that our last state will be worse than our first, if we surrender our reason into somebody's keeping.

Compulsory obedience to a master is a state of slavery, willing obedience to one's father is the glory of son ship.

I would like to say that that even the teachings of the Koran cannot be exempted from criticism.

A perfect Muslim is he from whose tongue and hands mankind is safe.

The early Mussalmans accepted Islam not because they knew it to be revealed but because it appealed to their virgin reason.

Surely Islam has nothing to fear from criticism even if it be unreasonable.

A slave- holder, who has decided to abolish slavery, does not consult his slaves whether they desire freedom or not.

A slave has not the freedom even to do the right thing.

Let no one try to justify the glaring difference between the classes and the masses, the prince and the pauper, by saying that the former need more.

"All men are born equal and free" is not Nature's law in the literal sense.

The notion of education through handicrafts rises from the contemplation of truth and love permeating life's activities.

True democracy is not inconsistent with a few persons representing the spirit, the hope and the aspirations of those whom they claim to represent.

Islam was nothing if it did not spell complete democracy.

I hold it a blasphemy to say that the Creator resides in a temple from which a particular class of His devotees sharing faith in it are excluded.

Love never claims, it ever gives.

Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt. And a citizen who barters with such a state shares in its corruption and lawlessness.

Evil is, good or truth misplaced.

The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. Freedom and slavery are mental states.

Kashmir is the real test of secularism in India.

Untouchability of foreign cloth is as much a virtue with all of us as untouchability of the suppressed classes must be a sin with every devout Hindu.

There is no reason to believe that there is one law for families and another for nations.

I claim to be no more than an average man with below average capabilities.

Live every day like it is your last and learn everyday like you will live forever

Democracy comes naturally to him who is habituated normally to yield willing obedience to all laws, human or divine.

Cow-slaughter can never be stopped by law.

Is a civilization worth the name, which requires, for its existence the very doubtful prop of a racial legislation and a lynch law?

The privilege of resisting or disobeying a particular law or order accrues only to him who gives willing and unswerving obedience to the laws laid down for him.

Complete civil disobedience is a state of peaceful rebellion, a refusal to obey every single state-made law.

The Allah of Islam is the same as the God of Christians and the Ishwar of Hindus.

I love Christianity, Islam and many other faiths - through Hinduism.

If you want to play your part in the world's affairs, you must refuse to deck yourselves for pleasing man.

Languages proclaim that woman is half of man, and by parity of reasoning, man is half of woman.

When there is war, the poet lays down the lyre, the lawyer his law reports, the schoolboy his books.

War knows no law except that of might.

Violence is bound sooner or later to exhaust itself but peace cannot issue out of such exhaustion.

We have to tackle the triple malady which holds our villages fast in its grip; want of corporate sanitation, deficient diet and inertia.

Today the cities dominate and drain the villages so that they are crumbling to ruin.

Return to the villages means a definite, voluntary recognition of the duty of bread labour and all its connotes.

Khaddar is an attempt to revise and reverse the process and establish a better relationship between the cities and villages.

I would like to bury myself in an Indian village, preferably in a Frontier village.

If we want to impart education best suited to the needs of the villagers, we should take the vidyapith to the villages.

If the village worker is not a decent man or woman, conducting a decent home, he or she had better not aspire after the high privilege and honour of becoming a village worker.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Though philosophical Hinduism has no other god but God, it cannot be denied that practical Hinduism is not so emphatically uncompromising as Islam.

The Law which governs all life is God.

The Law is God. Anything attributed to Him is not a mere attribute. He is Truth, Love, Law and a million things that human ingenuity can name.

The Law and the Lawgiver are one.

Man can only describe God in his own poor language.

Buddha emphasized and re-declared the eternal and unalterable existence of the moral government of this universe. He unhesitatingly said that the law was God Himself.

God is known by many names. And in the last analysis God's names were as many as human beings.

God's laws are eternal and unalterable and not separable from God Himself.

God rules even where Satan seems to hold sway, because the latter exists only on God's sufferance.

God Himself has reserved no right of revision of His own laws nor is there any need for Him for any such revision.

Faith is like the Himalaya mountains which cannot possibly change.

My attitude towards the British is one of utter friendliness and respect.

I claim to have been a lifelong and wholly disinterested friend of the British people.

If you must kill English officials, why not kill me instead?

It was not through democratic methods that Britain bagged India.

The collectors of revenue and the policeman are the only symbols by which millions in India's villages know British rule.

Our nonviolence vis-а-vis the British Government has been the nonviolence of the weak.

What senseless violence does is to prolong the lease of life of the British or foreign rule.

The Indian struggle is not anti-British, it is anti-exploitation, anti-foreign rule, not anti-foreigners.

There are unjust laws as there are unjust men.

I do not want my house to be rounded by walls and my windows to be closed to other cultures. I wish to become familiar with the culture of lands as much as possible but I will not permit them to affect me or shake me from my own status.

God's grace and revelation are the monopoly of no race or nation.

Faith is not imparted like secular subjects. It is given through the language of the heart.

Nonviolence is the law of the human race and is infinitely greater than, and superior to, brute force.

Crime and vice generally require darkness for prowling. They disappear when light plays upon them.

The chains of a slave are broken the moment he considers himself a free man.

... the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties driven asunder.

The only safe and honorable course for a self-respecting man is to do what I have decided to do, that is, to submit without protest to the penalty of disobedience ... not for want of respect for lawful authority, but in obedience to the higher law of our being, the voice of conscience.

I must fight unto the death the unholy attempt to impose British methods and British institutions on India.

My motto is "Unite now, today if you can; fight if you must. But in every case avoid British intervention."

The British are weak in numbers, we are weak in spite of our numbers.

The British power is the overlord without whom Indian princes cannot breathe.

India is less manly under the British rule than she ever was before.

That I want to destroy British imperialism is another matter, but I want to do so by converting those who are associated with it.

The Britisher is the top dog and the Indian the underdog in his own country.

Let us learn from the English rulers the simple fact that the oppressors are blind to the enormity of their own misdeeds.

There is as much need for a change of heart among the Hindus and Mussalmans as there is among the British, before a proper settlement is arrived at.

Christianity in India is inextricably mixed up for the last hundred and fifty years with the British rule.

Healthy and nourishing food was the only alpha and omega of rural economy.

A samagra gramsevak must know everybody living in the village and render them such service as he possibly can.

If untouchability is an integral part of Hinduism, the latter is a spent bullet.

Not violence, nor untruth but non-violence and Truth are the laws of our being.