“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.”

We always said that our struggle was not only against the British as representatives of colonialism, it was against all the evil that existed in India. The evil of the feudal system, the evil of the system based on caste, the evil of economic injustice.

I don’t mind if my life goes in the service of the nation. If I die, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation.

You don’t help a country by supporting a military regime that denies any sign of democracy, and what defeated Pakistan was its military regime.

I learned very soon to get along by myself.

I cannot understand how anyone can be an Indian and not be proud.

When it’s impossible, it’s better to stoop to compromise, without resisting and without complaining. People who complain are selfish.

There is not love where there is no will.

My father was a saint. I’m not.

It is our duty to create a social milieu in which the young and the socially weak feel that the present and future belong to them.

The old need the company of the young so that they renew their contact with life.

To become capable, one must have faith in oneself.

It’s not right to say that my father influenced me more than others, and I wouldn’t be able to say whether my personality was formed more by my father or my mother or the Mahatma [Gandhi] or the friends who were with us.

To be a mother, a housewife, never cost me any sacrifice – I savored every minute of those years.

Every new experience brings its own maturity and a greater clarity of vision.

In all communities you find groups that behave badly. But you must understand them too.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Bipartisanship is not what is missing in Washington. Common sense is.

The heyday of woman’s life is the shady side of fifty.

A member of the committee slapped a name tag over my left bosom. “What shall we name the other one?” I smiled. She was not amused.

Happiness, at my age, is breathing

All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.

Friends are “annuals” that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a “perennial” that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There’s a place in the garden for both of them.

With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals?

You know you’re getting old when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work.