Mahatma Gandhi Quotes
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So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see.
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To practice nonviolence in mundane matters is to know its true value.
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Indeed the very word, nonviolence, a negative word, means that it is an effort to abandon the violence that is inevitable in life.
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I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor.
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Repression does for a true man or a nation what fire does for gold.
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The author of the Mahabharata has not established the necessity of physical warfare; on the contrary he has proved its futility.
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Death is no fiend, he is the truest of friends. He delivers us from agony.
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With every true friendship, we build more firmly the foundations on which the peace of the whole world rests.
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I am not conscious of a single experience throughout my three months' stay in England and Europe that made me feel that after all East is East and West is West. On the contrary, I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter under what clime it flourishes, and that if you approached people with trust and affection you would have ten-fold trust and thousand-fold affection returned to you.
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Harshness is conquered by gentleness, hatred by love, lethargy by zeal and darkness by light.
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Prayer is a sign of repentance, a desire to become better, purer.
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True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding the true path for ourselves, and fearlessly following it.
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I do not regard flesh-food as necessary for us at any stage and under any clime in which it is possible for human beings ordinarily to live, I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species.
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My effort should never be to undermine another's faith but to make him a better follower of his own faith.
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The spinning wheel is the auspicious symbol of sharir yajna, body labour.
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My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest... no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak... Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism... true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.
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But you can wake a man only if he is really asleep. No effort that you make will produce any effect upon him if he is merely pretending sleep.
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We are our own slaves, not of the British. This should be engraved on our minds. The whites cannot remain if we do not want them. If the idea is to drive them out with firearms, let every Indian consider what precious little profit Europe has found in these.
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I am not fighting machinery as such, but the madness of thinking that machinery saves labor. Men save labor until thousands of them are without work and die of hunger on the streets. I want to secure employment and livelihood not only to part of the human race, but for all. I will not have the enrichment of a few at the expense of the community. At present the machine is helping a small minority to live on the exploitation of the masses. The motive force of this minority is not humanity or love of their kind, but greed and avarice.
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A man with a grain of faith in God never loses hope, because he ever believes in the ultimate triumph of Truth.
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Tolerance gives us spiritual insight, which is as far from fanaticism as the north pole is from the south.
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A vow is fixed and unalterable determination to do a thing, when such a determination is related to something noble which can only uplift the man who makes the resolve.
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Today I know that physical training should have as much place in the curriculum as mental training.
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Whoever is victor, there should be, after the war, a commonwealth of all nations.