“He ran a gas station down in St. Louis… No, Mahatma Gandhi was a great leader of the 20th century.”

“He had access to Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, C. Rajagopalachari and all the post-Independence greats, such as K. Kamaraj, Jayaprakash Narayan and Indira Gandhi, none of whom hesitated to exploit his grit and ingenuity.”

“The musical equivalent of the towers of St Pancras Station”

“One of the greatest writers of [the 20th] century.”

“Ridden with conflicts and lacking the industrial base of communism and nazism, Islamism is nowhere near a danger of the magnitude of those that were faced down in the 20th century.”

“Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.”

“Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations.”

“There have been a couple of key-points, for example in 1942, we had to close down the papers at the behest of Mahatma Gandhi, and during the emergency when we had to face the full wrath of the government. On both the occasions, we carried our policy to its logical conclusion.”

“This is not an argument for levelling down but for raising up. The means for doing this are there. What matters is the will to do it. We all have a responsibility to ensure that the contours of the global economic map in the 21st century are not as steep and uneven as those of the 20th century.”

“Atomic physics, was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century.”