Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

Mankind has to get out of violence only through non-violence.

That which makes man the mere plaything of fate is God.

A man of truth must ever be confident, if he has also equal need to be diffident.

Man, through the cow, is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives.

It is degrading both for man and woman that woman should be called upon or induced to forsake the hearth and shoulder the rifle for the protection of that hearth.

Ahimsa is nothing if not a well-balanced, exquisite consideration for one's neighbour, and an idle man is wanting in that elementary consideration.

Cow-slaughter and man-slaughter are in my opinion two sides of the same coin.

Nonviolence, applied to very large masses of mankind, is a new experiment in the history of the world.

If treachery is the reward of trust, will the man who trusts come to harm?

All great religions have rightly regarded kama as the arch-enemy of man, anger or hatred coming only in the second place.

He who runs may see that opium and such other intoxicants and narcotics stupefy a man's soul and reduce him to a level lower than that of beasts.

Repression does for a true man or a nation what fire does for gold.

The field of research in the doctrine of civil resistance is necessarily limited, as the occasions for civil resistance in a man's life must not be frequent.

Every species, human and subhuman, has some distinguishing mark, so that you can tell a man from a beast, or a dog from a cow.

No one should dogmatize about the capacity of human nature for degradation or exaltation.

Study men laying down their lives without hurting anyone else in the cause of their country's freedom.

We burn the evil men do with their mortal remains. We treasure the memory of the good they do, and distance magnifies it.

No nation being under another nation can accept gifts, and kick at the responsibility attached to those gifts, imposed by the conquering nation.

No nation keeps another in subjection without herself turning into a subject nation.

Nations are not formed in a day, the formation requires years.

Freedom of a nation cannot be won by solitary acts of heroism though they may be of the true type, never by heroism so called.

A nation that is unfit to fight cannot, from experience, prove the virtue of not fighting.

Nationalism, like virtue, has its own reward.

National education to be truly national must reflect the national condition for the time being.

Non-co-operation is the quickest method of creating public opinion.

Truth and nonviolence are both the means and the end, and given the right type of men, the legislatures can be the means of achieving the concrete pursuit of truth and nonviolence.

A little of true nonviolence acts in a silent, subtle, unseen way and leavens the whole society.

To my mind, Swaraj based on nonviolence is the fulfillment of the constructive programme.

My creed of nonviolence is an extremely active force.

If all were nonviolent, there would be no anarchy and there would be no question of anybody being armed for meeting aggression from without.

If we are nonviolent through and through, our nonviolence would have been self-evident.

We cry for cow protection in the name of religion, but we refuse protection to the human cow in the shape of the girl-widow.

Satyagraha is itself an unmistakable mute prayer of an agonized soul.

Satyagraha is a force that has come to stay. No force in the world can kill it.

Satyagraha does not begin and end with civil disobedience.

A clear victory of satyagraha is impossible so long as there is ill will.

The satyagrahi strives to reach reason through the heart. The method of reaching the heart is to awaken public opinion.

A satyagrahi has always his minimum and it is this minimum that is wanted in connection with this struggle.

There is no time limit for a satyagrahi nor is there a limit to his capacity for suffering.

A satyagrahi is dead to his body even before the enemy attempts to kill him.

No confirmed satyagrahi is dismayed by dangers, seen or unseen, from his opponent's side.

To die without killing is the badge of a satyagrahi.

A satyagrahi is nothing if not instinctively law-abiding.

In the code of the satyagrahi, there is no such thing as surrender to brute force.

You are no Satyagrahi if you remain silent or passive spectators while your enemy is being done to death.

A satyagrahi may not ride two horses, truth and untruth, at the same time, nor, to change the metaphor, trim his sail to catch every breeze as you do in the name of communism.

If Swaraj is to be had by peaceful methods, it will only be attained by attention to every little detail of national life.

I know that not only is Swaraj our birthright, but it is our sacred duty to win it.

I have had the hardihood to say that Swaraj could not be granted even by God.

With God as witness, I want to proclaim this truth, that the way of violence cannot bring Swaraj, it can only lead to disaster.