Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi citations (253 citations, Page 5)

I wanted to know the best of the life of one who holds today an undisputed sway over the hearts of millions of mankind. I became more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the Prophet the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle.
en
Années 1920

confiance , problème , courage , vie

“Je tiens au progrès, je tiens à la détermination personnelle, à la liberté, mais je les veux pour l'âme. Je doute que l'âge de l'acier soit supérieur à l'âge de pierre. Peu m'importe. C'est à l'évolution de l'âme qu'il faut consacrer toute notre intelligence et toutes nos autres facultés.”

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Années 1920

intelligence , liberté , faute , personnes

“Je veux développer chez l'enfant ses mains, son cerveau et son âme. Les mains sont presque atrophiées, de même que l'âme a été trop tenue à l'écart.”

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Années 1940

enfants , âme

“La non-violence est la plus grande force que l'humanité ait à sa disposition. Elle est plus puissante que l'arme la plus destructrice inventée par l'homme.”

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Années 1940

hommes

“Le vrai démocrate est celui qui, avec des moyens purement non violents, défend sa liberté, partant, celle de son pays et, en fin de compte, celle de l'humanité toute entière.”

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Années 1940

liberté , pays , démocratie

“Chacun a raison de son propre point de vue, mais il n'est pas impossible que tout le monde ait tort.”

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Années 1940

monde

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: Citations en anglais

“God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

1928, as reported in Development Without Destruction: Economics of the Spinning Wheel, p. 97
1920s

“I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Young India (15 September 1920), reprinted in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 21 (electronic edition), p. 252.
1920s

“[R]eal Swaraj will come, not by the acquisition of authority by a few, but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when it is abused. In other words, Swaraj is to be attained by educating the masses to a sense of their capacity to regulate and control authority.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Young India (29 January 1925) p. 41
1920s

“I invite even the school of violence to give this peaceful non-co-operation a trial. It will not fail through its inherent weakness. It may fail because of poverty of response. Then will be one time for real danger. The high-souled men, who are unable to suffer national humiliation any longer, will want to vent their wrath. They will take to violence.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

1920s, The Doctrine Of The Sword (1920)

“I would, in a sense, certainly assist the Amir of Afghanistan if he waged war against the British Government. That is to say, I would openly tell my countrymen that it would be a crime to help a government which had lost the confidence of the nation to remain in power.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

May 4, 1921. Gandhi commenting on the appeal to the Amir of Afghanistan to invade British India proposed by some Muslim leaders. Quoted from B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)
1920s

“I regard myself as a soldier, though a soldier of peace.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Speech at Victoria Hall, Geneva (10 December 1931) http://www.gandhiserve.org/information/listen_to_gandhi/lec_11_france_genevawtrans/augven_geneva_01.html
1930s

“The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

From Discussion with BG Kher and others, 15 August 1940. Gandhi's Wisdom Box (1942), edited by Dewan Ram Parkash, p. 67 also in Collected works of Mahatma Gandhi Vol. 79 (PDF) http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/VOL079.PDF, p. 122
1940s

“I wanted to know the best of the life of one (Muhammad) who holds today an undisputed sway over the hearts of millions of mankind. I became more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the Prophet the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Young India (23 September 1924) Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/VOL029.PDF, vol.29, "My Jail experiences", p. 133
1920s

“The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi's Collected Works, Vol 74 (1938)
1930s

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Introduction to the publication of Tolstoy's A Letter to a Hindu, Indian opinion, 25 December, (1909)
1900s

“My ambition is much higher than independence. Through the deliverance of India, I seek to deliver the so-called weaker races of the Earth from the crushing heels of Western exploitation in which England is the greatest partner.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Young India (12 January 1928). Quoted in The Essential Writings of Gandhi, edited by Judith Brown. Oxford University Press, 2008, (p. 153).
1920s

“Why, of all places in Johannesburg, the Indian location should be chosen for dumping down all kaffirs of the town, passes my comprehension. Of course, under my suggestion, the Town Council must withdraw the Kaffirs from the Location. About this mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians I must confess I feel most strongly. I think it is very unfair to the Indian population, and it is an undue tax on even the proverbial patience of my countrymen.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Letter to Dr. Porter, Medical Officer of Health for Johannesburg (15 February 1905); later published in The Indian Opinion.
1900s

“The English have taught us that we were not one nation before and that it will reaquire centuries before we become one nation. This is without foundation. We were one nation before they came to India. One thought inspired us. Our mode of life was the same. It was because we were one nation that they were able to establish one kingdom. Subsequently they divided us.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

1900s, Hind Swaraj (1908)

“I worship God as Truth only. I have not yet found Him, but I am seeking after Him.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

An Autobiography (1936); also in All Men Are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections (2005) edited by Krishna Kripalani, p. 63
1930s

“Whatever the ultimate fate of my country, my love for you remains, and will remain, undiminished. My non-violence demands universal love, and you are not a small part of it. It is that love which has prompted my appeal to you.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

1940s, To Every Briton (1940)

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Widely attributed to Gandhi, sometimes citing Ramachandra Krishna Prabhu, The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism (1959). (Cf. Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier (2006), p. 74.) However, it is not found in that essay http://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/moralbasis_vegetarianism.pdf nor in any of Gandhi's Complete works. http://animalsmattertogod.com/2013/09/13/mahatma-gandhi-hoax-quote-greatness-of-a-nation-and-its-moral-progress-can-be-judged-by-the-way-that-its-animals-are-treated/
The original quote seems to be by David Strauss, The Old Faith and the New (Der alte und der neue Glaube, 1872, trans. by M. Blind, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1873), vol. II, ch. 71, p. 59 https://archive.org/stream/oldfaithnewconfe01stra#page/59/mode/2up: The manner in which a nation in the aggregate treats animals, is one chief measure of its real civilization.
Similar quotes, not attributed to Gandhi, are found throughout the twentieth century: e.g. The great actress, Mrs Fiske, once said to me, "The civilization of any country can be told by the way it treats its animals" (Zoe Berkeley, "Zoe Berkeley's Corner", Salinas Index-Journal, 1933-07-01, p. 8).
Attributed to Gandhi since at least 1980: The seal hunt truly is Canada's shame and we would do well to think of the words of Gandhi when he said, "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated" (Doris Potter, Letter to the editor, The Gazette (Montreal), 1980-03-18, p. 8).
Disputed

“Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

http://books.google.com/books?id=VsMLYjEsyaEC&pg=PA446
Gandhi, An Autobiography, p. 446 (Beacon Press paperback edition)
1930s

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Non-Violence in Peace and War, 1942, Vol. 1, Ch. 142
1940s

“I say without fear of my figures being successfully challenged that India today is more illiterate than it was before a fifty or hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root and left the root like that and the beautiful tree perished.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi, Speech at Chatham House, London, on October 20, 1931. Quoted in Essential Writings of Dharampal by Dharampal, and quoted in S.R. Goel, Hindu Society under siege http://web.archive.org/web/20170202032436/http://bharatvani.org/books/hsus/ch4.htm
1930s

“There was a time when people listened to me because I showed them how to give fight to the British without arms when they had no arms and the British Government was fully equipped and organised for an armed fight. But today I am told that my non-violence can be of no avail against the communal madness and, therefore, people should arm themselves for self-defence. If this is true, it has to be admitted that our thirty years of nonviolent practice was an utter waste of time. We should have from the beginning trained ourselves in the use of arms. But I do not agree that our thirty years' probation in nonviolence has been utterly wasted. It was due to our non-violence, defective though it was, that we were able to bear up under the heaviest repression and the message of independence penetrated every nook and corner of India. But as our non-violence was the nonviolence of the weak, the leaven did not spread. Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Speech (16 June 1947) as the official date for Indian independence approached (15 August 1947), as quoted in Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (1958) https://books.google.com/books?id=sswBAAAAMAAJ&q=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&dq=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj6ydqTtK7LAhUI4D4KHW3-DwEQ6AEIHTAA by Pyarelal Nayyar, p. 326 http://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/mahatma-gandhi-volume-ten.pdf
1940s

“I have even seen the writings suggesting that I am playing a deep game, that I am using the present turmoil to foist my fads on India, and am making religious experiments at India's expense. I can only answer that Satyagraha is made of sterner stuff. There is nothing reserved and nothing secret in it.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

"A Word of Explanation" in Young India (January 1921)
1920s

“Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Address given in Bombay (26 September 1896), Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 1, p. 410 (Electronic Book), New Delhi, Publications Division Government of India, 1999, 98 volumes.
1890s

“In the dictionary of Satyagraha, there is no enemy.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Non-Violence in Peace and War (1948); also in Gandhi on Non-violence: Selected Texts from Mohandas K. Gandhi's Non-Violence in Peace and War (1965) edited by Thomas Merton
1940s

“A man of truth must also be a man of care.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Part I, Chapter 5, At the High School
1920s, An Autobiography (1927)

“My joy was boundless. I had learnt the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realized the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby - not even money, certainly not my soul.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Part II, Chapter 14, Preparation for the Case
1920s, An Autobiography (1927)

“Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Harijan (28 July 1949) p. 219
1940s

“What the divine author of the Mahabharata said of his great creation is equally true of Hinduism. Whatever of substance is contained in any other religion is always to be found in Hinduism, and what is not contained in it is insubstantial or unnecessary.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Young India (27 September 1925)
1920s

“Nor, do I believe in inequalities between human beings. We are all absolutely equal. But equality is of the souls and not the bodies. Hence, it is a mental state. We need to think of, and to assert, equality because we see great inequality in the physical world. We have to realize equality in the midst of this apparent external inequality. Assumption of superiority by any person over any other is a sin against God and man. Thus caste, in so far as it connotes distinctions in status, is an evil.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, by Joan V. Bondurant (1965) University of California Press, Berkeley: CA, pp. 168-169
Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

“In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi

Young India (4 August 1920)
1920s

“The only tyrant I accept in this world is the "still small voice" within me. And even though I have to face the prospect of being a minority of one, I humbly believe I have the courage to be in such a hopeless minority.”

Help us translate this quote

Mahatma Gandhi livre The Essential Gandhi

In Young India (2 March 1922). Quoted in The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas edited by Louis Fischer (2002), p. 160 http://books.google.com/books?id=gz6l-vCVgxQC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA160#v=onepage&q&f=false.
1920s