"When you remove the concept of reward and punishment on merit, the result is the utter destruction of social fabric."

"There are greater goals in life than material and sensual pleasures"

"Truth is the power that will resolve our problems."

"Faith should be about encouraging all that is noble in a human being."

"My father was a statesman, I am a political woman. My father was a saint. I am not."

"People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights."

"You can't shake hands with a clenched fist."

"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."

"Winning or losing of the election is less important than strengthening the country."

"We have to prove to the disinherited majority of the world that ecology and conservation will not work against their interest but will bring an improvement in their lives."

"I have lived a long life, and I am proud that I spend the whole of my life in the service of my people. I am only proud of this and nothing else. 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."

"I think basically I'm lazy, but I have a housewife's mentality when I go about my job."

"Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic."

"Have a bias toward action - let's see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away."

"There is not love where there is no will."

"There exists no politician in India daring enough to attempt to explain to the masses that cows can be eaten."

"I'm certainly not a workaholic."

"I am not a person to be pressured - by anybody or any nation."

"Ability is not always gauged by examination."

"The environmental problems of developing countries are not the side effects of excessive industrialisation but reflect the inadequacy of development."

"We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further, and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people. Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?"

"This is why we feel that democracy's important: because democracy allows you to have small explosions and therefore avoid the bigger explosions."

"All the people who fought for freedom were my heroes. I mean, that was the sort of story I liked reading... freedom struggles and so on."

"The power to question is the basis of all human progress."

"I've never turned to anybody for advice and counsel. Even when I was a very small child, I had to stand on my feet because of the circumstances of those times, and somehow, the circumstances have remained more or less the same. I have to take my own decisions."

"The people have nothing to fear of me; people have never feared me."

"On the one hand, the rich look askance at our continuing poverty - on the other, they warn us against their own methods."

"Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning."

"If I see something dirty or untidy, I have to clean it up."

"One must beware of ministers who can do nothing without money, and those who want to do everything with money."

"I don't think my father was my mentor."

"Wearing khadi was a badge of honour. It was something one was proud to do."

"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."

"All my games were political games; I was, like Joan of Arc, perpetually being burned at the stake."

"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking;"

"A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul."

"The sobs and tears of joy he had not foreseen rose with such force within him that his whole body shook and for a long time prevented him from speaking. Falling on his knees by her bed. He held his wife's hand to his lips and kissed it, and her hand responded to his kisses with weak movement of finger. Meanwhile, at the foot of the bed, in the midwife's expert hands, like the flame of a lamp, flickered the life of a human being who had never existed before..."

"True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception."

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."

"The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom."

"Woman, you see, is an object of such a kind that study it as much as you will, it is always quite new."

"He sends a cross, but He also sends the strength to bear it."

"A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator the smaller the fraction."

"True life is lived when tiny changes occur."

"Some mathematician has said pleasure lies not in discovering truth, but in seeking it."

"If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts."

"Joy can be real only if people look on their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness."

"It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice"

"It is true, I deny the incomprehensible Trinity, and the fable regarding the fall of man, which is absurd in our day. It is true, I deny the sacrilegious story of a God born of a virgin to redeem the race."

"In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you."