Browsing Topic Best Castes Quotes

There is only one caste… the caste of humanity. There is only one religion… the religion of love. There is only one language… the language of the heart.

Every strategy for real social change – land reform, education, public health, the equitable distribution of natural resources … – has been cleverly, cunningly, and consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes and that class of people which has a stranglehold on the political process.

A bitter thing cannot be made sweet. The taste of anything can be changed. But poison cannot be changed into nectar

I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.

Education is a liberating force, and in our age it is also a democratizing force, cutting across the barriers of caste and class, smoothing out inequalities imposed by birth and other circumstances.

The caste system, in all its various forms, is always based on identifiable physical characteristics – sex, color, age.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity — a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.

Now that practical skills have developed enough to provide adequately for material needs, one of these sciences which are not devoted to utilitarian ends [mathematics] has been able to arise in Egypt, the priestly caste there having the leisure necessary for disinterested research.

Equality may be a fiction but nonetheless one must accept it as a governing principle.

Because of the caste system, because of the fact that there is no social link between those who make the decisions and those who suffer the decisions, the Indian government just goes ahead and does what it wants. The people also assume that this is their lot, their karma, what was written. It’s quite an efficient way of doing things. Therefore, India has a very good reputation in the world as a democracy, as a government that cares, that has just got too much on its hands, whereas, in fact, it’s actually creating the problems.

As Indian citizens, we subsist on a regular diet of caste massacres and nuclear tests, mosque breakings and fashion shows, church burnings and expanding cell phone networks, bonded labor and the digital revolution, female infanticide and the NASDAQ crash, husbands who continue to burn their wives for dowry and our delectable stockpile of Miss Worlds. What’s hard to reconcile oneself to, both personally and politically, is the schizophrenic nature of it.

The kingdom is not an exclusive, well-trimmed suburb with snobbish rules about who can live there. No, it is for a larger, homelier, less self-conscious caste of people who understand they are sinners because they have experienced the yaw and pitch of moral struggle.

I like the religion that teaches liberty, equality and fraternity.

Especially in urban areas, nobody cares so much [about castes], because you are forced to live in the same buildings. There is so, so little space. You can’t be thinking about whether you are living in a street that has only Brahmins, or in a building that has been touched only by Muslims or Christians. You just live there, because that’s the only place that you can find. So such distinctions just crumble away. There are people who maintain them, at all costs. But for the most part, it doesn’t matter.

Justice has always evoked ideas of Equality, of proportion of compensation. In short, Justice is another name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.

Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards our fellow men.

Caste is a state of mind. It is a disease of mind. The teachings of the Hindu religion are the root cause of this disease. We practice casteism and we observe Untouchability because we are enjoined to do so by the Hindu religion. A bitter thing cannot be made sweet. The taste of anything can be changed. But poison cannot be changed into nectar.

I had grown up in a privileged, upper-caste Hindu community; and because my father worked for a Catholic hospital, we lived in a prosperous Christian neighborhood.

Caste is not just a division of labour, it is a division of labourers.

The Olympic Movement is a 20th century religion. Where there is no injustice of caste, of race, of family, of wealth.

Cultivation of mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence.

All prejudices, whether of race, sect or sex, class pride and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs and prigs.

I actually did a quick survey of how caste plays out in contemporary India. The idea that democracy and development have in some ways eroded caste turned out not to be the case, that it has in fact been entrenched and modernised.

If we claim heritage in Bacon, Shakespeare and Milton, we also acknowledge that it was for liberties guaranteed Englishmen by sacred charters our fathers triumphantly fought. While wisely rejecting throne and caste and privilege and an Established Church in their new-born state, they adopted the substance of English liberty and the body of English law.

When we choose a mobile network, do we check whether Airtel or Vodafone belong to a particular caste? No, we simply choose the provider based on the best value or service. Then why do we vote for somebody simply because he belongs to the same caste as us?

Because of the expensive system and the competition among various groups, democracy needs a lot of money. As a natural consequence it becomes the slave of the great Jewish international finance which subjugates it by subvention. In this fashion the fate of a people is given into the hands of a caste of bankers.

The eye cannot see it; the mind cannot grasp it. The deathless Self (the Supreme Soul or God) has neither caste nor race, Neither eyes, nor ears, nor hands, nor feet, Sages, this Self is infinite, present in the great and in the small, Everlasting and changeless, the source of life.

We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.

‘Rugged individualism’ has meant all the ‘individualism’ for the masters, while the people are regimented into a slave caste to serve a handful of self-seeking ‘supermen.’ America is perhaps the best representative of this kind of individualism, in whose name political tyranny and social oppression are defended and held up as virtues; while every aspiration and attempt of man to gain freedom and social opportunity to live is denounced as ‘un-American’ and evil in the name of that same individuality.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

There is no caste in blood.

The West remains obsessed by the caste system.

As the dog becomes thoroughbred in the laws of clan and caste; obedient, fraternal and loyal; so is the man who accepts the gentleman’s code.