Short Gandhi Quotes

Renunciation of objects, without the renunciation of desires, is short-lived, however hard you may try.

Life isn’t so bad. I’m not fat (unless you’re Gandhi), I’m not short (unless you’re Goliath), and I’m not ugly (unless you’re James Dean).

In 1951 Dec 20th, Nehru, while campaigning for the first democratic elections in India, took a short break to address a UNESCO symposium in Delhi. Although he believed democracy was the best form of governance, while speaking at the symposium he wondered loud... the quality of men who are selected by these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates because of lack of thinking and the noise of propaganda....He[the voter] reacts to sound and to the din, he reacts to repetition and he produces either a dictator or a dumb politician who is insensitive. Such a politician can stand all the din in the world and still remain standing on his two feet and, therefore, he gets selected in the end because the others have collapsed because of the din. -Quoted from India After Gandhi, page 157.

Kindness can be short, sweet, transient, and random, but its effects echo forever.

story short, my return to India found me in no time one with India’s women. The easy access I had to their hearts was an agreeable revelation to me. Muslim sisters never kept purdah before me here, even as they did not in South Africa. I sleep in the ashram surrounded by women, for they feel safe with me in every respect. It should be remembered that there is no privacy in the Segaon Ashram.

But from the Parthenon and the Timaeus a specious logic leads to the tyranny which, in the Republic, is held up as the ideal form of government. In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet - the scientific poet - of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretentions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard as inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection. And because they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered and from morning till night a million schoolteachers and broadcasters proclaim the infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.

One of the worst despots in my time in India was the Maharaja of Patiala. When a group of distinguished Indians once charged him with everything from rape to murder, Lord Irwin ordered an investigation – by a British official chosen by the Maharaja. The investigation was secret, and cleared the ruler. Shortly thereafter, the Maharaja withdrew his support for a self-governing India, and was immediately promoted by the King-Emperor to be an honorary lieutenant general in His Majesty's armed services. Though honorary, it was quite a high rank. ____footnote, Chapter 4

I felt that it was not a historical work, but that, under the guise of physical warfare, it described the duel that perpetually went on in the hearts of mankind, and that physical warfare was brought in merely to make the description of the internal duel more alluring. This preliminary intuition became more confirmed on a closer study of religion and the Gita. A study of the Mahabharata gave it added confirmation. I do not regard the Mahabharata as a historical work in the accepted sense. The Adiparva contains powerful evidence in support of my opinion. By ascribing to the chief actors superhuman or subhuman origins, the great Vyasa made short work the history of kings and their peoples. The persons therein described may be historical, but the author of the Mahabharata has used them merely to drive home his religious theme.

Einstein felt that he did not have great mathematical gifts and deliberately chose not to take courses and to continue in that area. The fact that I neglected mathematics to a certain extent had its causes not merely in my stronger interest in science than in mathematics but also in the following strange experience....I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialties, each of which could easily absorb the short lifetime granted to us....In physics, however, I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential. This capacity to pick out important issues dovetailed with Einstein's search for the most general possible conception. "In a man of my type," he declared, "the turning point of the development lies in the fact that gradually the major interest disengages itself to a far reaching degree from the momentary and the merely personal and turns toward the striving for a mental grasp of things.

In June 1975, it was the venue for Jayaprakash Narayan’s one lakh-strong rally that rattled then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who shortly imposed Emergency rule.

Only the depth of bliss in meditation is an adequate measure of spiritual development. The archetypal American seeker: independent, restless, inquisitive, fed up with dogma and superstition, hungry for inner transformation and a taste of the Transcendent; in short, precisely the type of person who was eager to imbibe what ambassadors from the East had to offer. Customs and mannerisms are nonessentials resulting from certain climatic influences. The real development of man consists of the development of his mind power. "Self-realization" resonates with the yankee spirit of independence and personal improvement. - Why the Almighty permits evil, Yogananda asked. Gandhi responded: - I am content with the doing of the task in front of me. I do not worry about the why and wherefore of things. -

the installation of Congress ministries in six large provinces of British India was a major milestone in the constitutional history of the subcontinent. Much more power had devolved on to the shoulder of Indians than at any previous time in the history of the Raj. Indeed, since precolonial regimes were themselves devoid of democratic representation, and were run by unelected kings who nominated their ministers, this was the furthest that Indians had thus far got in the direction of self-rule, swaraj. Surely it was now only a matter of years before the Congress, and India, achieved the next step, of Dominion Status, thus to place themselves on par with Canada, Australiaand South Africa. A sign of how much of a departure from colonial practice these elections were is underlined in a humble office order issued by the Central Provinces government after their own Congress ministry was installed. It was signed by an Indian ICS officer, C.M. Trivedi, then serving as the secretary to the general administration department. The order was sent to all commissioners and deputy commissioners, the chief conservator of forests, the inspector general of police, all secretaries to government, and a host of other senior officials (including the military secretary and the governor), almost all of whom were, of course, British. The text of the order was short and simple, albeit, in the eyes of its recipients, not altogether sweet. It read: ‘In future Mr. Gandhi should be referred to in all correspondence as “Mahatma Gandhi”.

Arun Gandhi, the grandson of one of history’s most powerful proponents of nonviolence, wrote that Mahatma Gandhi “saw anger as a good thing, as the fuel for change.” But when we become violent, intending solely to hurt or damage, we’ve joined the forces of destruction. It takes wisdom and maturity to use anger for positive change without becoming mindlessly violent. It’s much easier—and in the short term, more gratifying—to go into a psychological mode of blind attack.

It is conventionally believed that it was the poet Rabindranath Tagore who first called Gandhi ‘Mahatma’. But the ascription is incorrect. As early as 1910, Gandhi’s friend Pranjivan Mehta referred to him as a ‘Mahatma’ in a letter he wrote to Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Mehta’s was a private declaration. The first public occasion on which the title may have been used was in the Kathiawari town of Gondal, which Gandhi and Kasturba visited shortly after their return to India. On 27 January 1915, the citizens of Gondal organized a reception for the Gandhis, to mark their return to the homeland and to honour their work in South Africa. At this reception, a locally respected priest named Jivram Kalidas Shastri presented Gandhi with a scroll which referred to him as a ‘Mahatma’. By the time of the Rowlatt satyagraha of 1919, the honorific ‘Mahatma’ was being widely used by Gandhi’s admirers across India. And sometimes misused. In January 1921, the bearer of the title was told that a brand of ‘Mahatma Gandhi Cigarettes’ was being marketed and sold. Gandhi was appalled, for in his view smoking was an ‘expensive vice’ which ‘fouls the breath, discolours the teeth and sometimes even causes cancer’. Through the columns of Young India, he urged the errant firm to withdraw the labels bearing his name from the market.

Polarized thinking (or “black-and-white” thinking). In polarized thinking, there is no middle ground. You are either perfect or a failure. You place people or situations in “either/or” categories, without allowing for the complexity of most people and situations. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. You are similarly polarized in judging others, which leads to frequent experiences of frustration and anger. The key to overcoming this type of thinking is to remind yourself, again and again, that most of life is shades of gray. Read a biography of someone universally honored for their contributions to society—Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., for example—and see how even the best of us are flawed and imperfect.

This book is really about the making of a great leader. In my own research and writings over many decades, I have concluded the following about leadership: You can neither manufacture nor can you buy leadership. You must earn it. Great leaders are great doers. They have a knack of organizing and inspiring the followers. Sometimes, they even generate cult-like loyalty. When the followers are ready, the leaders show up. Therefore, in times of crisis, uncertainty and chronic dissatisfaction, unexpected people become leaders. This was the case with Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. In short, ordinary people become extraordinary leaders. Great leaders are driven by purpose and passion. They derive boundless energy from their purpose and passion. To them, leadership is all about people. Management is all about grit and determination. Great leaders not only promise the future but deliver it. Great leaders are great architects. Like good architects, they imagine building something unique, enduring, and inspiring. Examples include the Pyramids, the ancient temples, churches and mosques; more recently, the Opera House in Sydney; the Olympic Stadium (Bird’s Nest) in Beijing; and Putrajaya, the new capital of Malaysia. There are three universal qualities of all great leaders: passion, caring, and capability. This is also true of great teachers.

THE CHASM – THE DIFFUSION MODEL WHY EVERYBODY HAS AN IPOD Why is it that some ideas – including stupid ones – take hold and become trends, while others bloom briefly before withering and disappearing from the public eye? Sociologists describe the way in which a catchy idea or product becomes popular as ‘diffusion’. One of the most famous diffusion studies is an analysis by Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross of the diffusion of hybrid corn in the 1930s in Greene County, Iowa. The new type of corn was better than the old sort in every way, yet it took twenty-two years for it to become widely accepted. The diffusion researchers called the farmers who switched to the new corn as early as 1928 ‘innovators’, and the somewhat bigger group that was infected by them ‘early adaptors’. They were the opinion leaders in the communities, respected people who observed the experiments of the innovators and then joined them. They were followed at the end of the 1930s by the ‘sceptical masses’, those who would never change anything before it had been tried out by the successful farmers. But at some point even they were infected by the ‘hybrid corn virus’, and eventually transmitted it to the die-hard conservatives, the ‘stragglers’. Translated into a graph, this development takes the form of a curve typical of the progress of an epidemic. It rises, gradually at first, then reaches the critical point of any newly launched product, when many products fail. The critical point for any innovation is the transition from the early adaptors to the sceptics, for at this point there is a ‘chasm’. According to the US sociologist Morton Grodzins, if the early adaptors succeed in getting the innovation across the chasm to the sceptical masses, the epidemic cycle reaches the tipping point. From there, the curve rises sharply when the masses accept the product, and sinks again when only the stragglers remain. With technological innovations like the iPod or the iPhone, the cycle described above is very short. Interestingly, the early adaptors turn away from the product as soon as the critical masses have accepted it, in search of the next new thing. The chasm model was introduced by the American consultant and author Geoffrey Moore. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Mahatma Gandhi